Want to write a novel in 2026? Start by reading this book
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to write a novel, there is no shortage of guides that aim to tell you how to do it. Many offer up concrete rules such as “kill your darlings”, “show don’t tell”, “write what you know” and Stephen King’s popular adage “write 1,000 words a day”.
These rules have been widely adopted because they are comforting. Writing a novel seems like such a nebulous, uncertain thing, closer to magic than science. Where do ideas come from? What kind of being is a character? When is the story finished? What a relief to think that by following a clear set of instructions, by just plodding through an A-Z manual, a novel will appear.
In A Long Game: How to Write Fiction, the American novelist, memoirist and short-story writer Elizabeth McCracken has no time for such comforting delusions. “As with any such book,” she admits on the first page, “a lot of it is hogwash.” A few pages later: “I have never encountered a rule for fiction I believed in, at least in the long run, apart from don’t use a gothic font to make your work feel spooky.”
With a warm blend of self-deprecating humour and light absurdity, McCracken goes on to dismantle each of the rock-solid rules to which generations of aspiring writers have clung. Of the advice “write what you know” she counters: “If you already know it — if there’s no mystery — what’s the point in writing it?” And as for writing 1,000 words every day, she argues that, “by circumstance or temperament, some writers can’t or shouldn’t”.
There’s no harm, McCracken says, in taking a break from writing when you need to. “You won’t injure yourself, writing after days or weeks of not writing; you won’t have atrophied. Indeed, you may be a cicada of a writer, back full force after going away.”
Alright, you might be thinking, but I’ve bought a book subtitled How to Write Fiction. I want it to tell me what I should do. Rest assured. A Long Game is full of brilliantly specific advice on everything from the chair you sit in to attenuating verbs. This has been winnowed from McCracken’s award-winning writing career, and also from her work as a creative writing teacher at the University of Texas. It is not instruction that she objects to but generalisation.
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It is no surprise that the strongest advice, the stuff I was scribbling down and committing to heart, is on developing characters. This is McCracken’s literary superpower — just read The Hero of This Book, which is a sharp, funny tale of a woman walking around London (I know you think you’ve read this sort of novel before, but trust me, you haven’t) and you’ll see how she can instantly conjure up a living, breathing person.
First, she says, remember your character’s physicality. It’s understandable to get stuck in their head, especially if they are your narrator — you are, after all, seeing the world through their eyes. But, McCracken says, “you want them in the room, on the ground, obeying the same laws of physics as the other characters”.
She even offers a sort of mindfulness exercise, travelling through your body and becoming aware of its intricacies so you can replicate them in fiction. “Remember a headache you’ve had, or an earache. Think about what angle you held your head to accommodate that pain … Think of a physical activity that uses your shoulders, your arms … Is it painful, pleasurable, both?”
The novelist, memoirist and short-story writer Elizabeth McCracken
Such physical awareness doesn’t only make a character feel real, it can make your plot come alive too. If you find the story has ground to a halt McCracken advises you “give your characters something to do, and the charge between them will change. Pruning roses, burying a body, cooking a meal, sex.”
She gets more specific when it comes to sentence structure and word choice. Avoid too many indirect constructions, or “filtering verbs” such as “I saw”, “I realised”, or “I knew”. Just say what your character sees. She gives an example: rather than writing, “When I walked into the kitchen, I saw that my mother was opening a canned ham,” you could opt for, “In the kitchen, my mother was opening a canned ham.” We know instinctively that the second construction is better. What makes this book so vital is that McCracken tells us why.
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A Long Game is written in the form of 280 distinct tips, some a sentence long, others more than a page. They are roughly ordered so that different elements of fiction — structure, character, language, plot, dialogue and so on — are clumped together. But really it’s best read from beginning to end, not used as a reference manual.
The somewhat loose structure means McCracken can include all sorts of gems of wisdom that might otherwise not have found a home, such as, “any job that allows you to daydream is good for a writer”, or “what we love is inspiring but what we hate is instructive”, or even “fiction could do with a little more farting”. At one point she lists punctuation from weakest to strongest, starting with a comma and ending with a part break.
For anyone who wants to write a novel, or for anyone who loves reading novels and wants to understand why some work and others fail, A Long Game is a joy. It is unpretentious but still respectful of fiction’s mystical powers, realistic about the likelihood of making the bestseller lists but optimistic about what a wonder it can be to try your hand at writing regardless.
She says: “To consider yourself a writer as you move about the world is — I am a true believer — a beautiful way to love, a form of open-mindedness, even in terrible times.”
A Long Game: How to Write Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken (Jonathan Cape £14.99 pp208). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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