I wrote my first novel during NaNoWriMo in 2004.
I was very, very pregnant with my youngest daughter. She was born on December 8. It was a heady week, let me tell you.
I’ve lost exact count of how many novels I’ve written since that one. Eight or ten? Two were published in 2013 and 2014 and another one in March of this year. I have one scheduled for release in 2020.
So fewer than half of all my finished novels have been published.
And I have twice as many half-finished manuscripts just sitting around on my hard drive and notes on that many more story ideas collected in notebooks.
I’ve gotten better at it.
But it was that first book — the one I only wrote because I was miserable and pretty sure November was going to last the whole rest of my life — that changed everything.
I started this post thinking I’d offer the one writing tip that was the best I’ve ever been given. But I can’t narrow it down.
So, instead — here are my top five. In no particular order.