"Mysteries of Pittsburgh" remains one of my all-time favorite novels. Got bored part way through "Wonder Boys" and never finished it. I've read a few of his others, none even a patch on "Mysteries...". Nobody's perfect :-)
Huh! I’ve read pretty much all his output and loved Wonder Boys most - it is hilarious. Moonglow was also great.. I think Kavalier and Clay was my least fave.
It sounds like "Wonder Boys" was at least in part autobiographical as the main character there also had a huge unfinished novel that had weird details like the genealogies and dental records of horses.
Here's the two best pieces of advice I've encountered:
1: Have a plan. Don't just write and write and hope for something to come out. Make a structured plot outline, then a scene-by-scene breakdown (just a few sentences of summary for each), then it'll be much easier to keep your head on straight when you get deep in the weeds. At least it'll help you see your story from a different perspective.
2: Writer's block is what happens when you try to write the final draft on your first draft.
The second one especially has been very helpful, as I tend to be a perfectionist and try to get the tone and everything exactly right, which leads to stalled-brain-syndrome.
I hope that can be some help, or at least some encouragement! Good luck!
Stephen King has frequently said that he just starts writing with a few interesting characters in a room together and the novel flows from there because good characters cause the story to tell itself almost by magic.
The problem with this particular advice is that it omits the first and most essential part: "be Stephen King"
There are a million systems out there for organizing story construction, whether it's one of the various outlining systems, or the Hero's Journey, or whatever, but nearly all stories follow the same essential pattern of rising and falling action in X number of acts. There's even been meta-studies on story going back into ancient times, and all stories from all cultures can be fit roughly into the same pattern.
King and others like him either omit or have forgotten how they came to understand these patterns. Maybe it was natural instinct, maybe years of slogging through practice stories that no one ever saw, but most people instinctively know what a good story is, and all successful authors have matched that pattern one way or another.
Doing it without a plan, especially when you're just starting out, is asking for trouble. It's possible to write an amazing story on your first try with no plan, if you're the next Hemingway or something, but for most people you'll just end up drafting and re-drafting and probably end up like Chabon himself, five years and 1000+ pages into an insane rambling mess.
GRRM has a similar approach, the outline way mentioned above is really helpful for those not that gifted, Brandon Sanderson mentions it heavily talking about his fiction writing (if you're telling a story you know you already have an outline, not the case in fiction) and is considered among the best in meeting deadlines -- outlines being one of the main tools to achieve that.
Everyone's novel draft is broken in a different way, though some advice can be better than others. Have you ever read Story Grid by Coyne? He's someone who edited at a major publisher before going out on his own, and he wrote a book about his tools for editing novels. Might be worth a look if you're deep down an editing pit.
