When I decided to write my first novel, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know if I could do it. It was a massive, incomprehensible project looming over me. I wanted to know, needed to know, if I could do it.
Before anything else, I find the most useful thing to do is to admit that I don’t know everything. I completely, 100 % admitted to myself and anyone who asked that I didn’t know how to write the novel that I so desperately wanted to write. I had no idea where to start. The first ‘chunk’ or set of scenes was the hardest.
This was fiction. This was ‘make belief’ laced with a high level of realism since I wanted my potential readers (if there were any out there) to get pulled into the fictional homicide investigation I was creating and become invested in the outcome.