Outline.

Write the ending first. Make sure you know how your characters get from one scene to the next for every scene. There’s no such thing as a ‘pantser’. They end up writing a bunch of extra crap and wasting time and going back and working out the outline after the fact, and trust me, it’s twice as hard coming up with an elegant way of resolving your plot and story arcs that way, because you have to retrofit stuff and throw out a ton of crap you thought you needed but don’t.

So, to recap, write the biggest landmarks first. Then fill in the smaller landmarks in between. Then smaller than that. Keep going down in granularity until you’re writing scenes, then write the scenes, and you have a draft.

If you do not start with the broadest strokes first, building your story framework true and solid so you know where all the corners and leddges are FIRST, you WILL FAIL. The same rules apply to creating in EVERY OTHER ART FORM.

You can do the ‘pantser’ stuff when you get down to the level of writing scenes, and if you hold that off till then, it’ll be fun, because you’ll already know what the scene has to do in your story, what your characters need from each scene, and how everything works relative to the chapter that comes before it and the chapter that comes next.

Then you can do a polish pass and make everything look like you planned it all along in the first place.

Then get beta readers at minimum, a story editor if you can afford one, and a copy editor to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, because nothing pisses off a reader more than finding typos in your book and it makes you look like an amateur. Listen to your editor and your beta readers, they’ll tell you things you don’t want to hear but that you’ll have to fix.

And that’s how to write a novel. If you stick to this and you write a thousand words a day, you can write two full length novels a year.

Go write.