How do I start writing a novel in 2026 as a total beginner?

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

You need one place to write, a way to keep your notes, and a habit. That is the whole list. Here is how we would set up each one if we were starting again today.

Every year a lot of people decide this is the year they write the novel. Most of them stop before the end of the first month, and it is almost never because they lacked talent. They stopped because starting felt like it required a plan, a system, a dozen decisions about software, and a clear picture of the whole book. It doesn't. You need one place to write, a way to keep your notes, and a habit. Everything else can be picked up on the way.

We are two writers who built a writing app, so we have a stake in some of the answers below. We have tried to be fair anyway, and we say plainly where our own tool comes in, in one section near the end.

Do I need an idea, or a whole plot?

An idea. One. Not a plot, not a cast of forty, not a magic system with rules. The smallest useful idea is a person who wants something and a reason they cannot simply have it. If you can say that in a sentence, you have enough to start writing scenes.

The rest arrives while you write. That sounds like a platitude, but it is closer to a mechanical fact: you cannot know what a character would do in chapter twelve until you have watched them get through chapters one to eleven. Beginners often wait for the whole story to appear before writing the first line. It doesn't appear. It gets built.

Do I need to outline first?

Some people do, some people don't, and the argument between them has been running longer than either of us has been writing. Our practical answer for a first novel: write one page. On it, put your opening (where we meet the character and what is off balance), your ending (roughly how it resolves, even if you change it later), and four turns in between, the moments where the situation gets worse or the character learns something that changes the plan.

That is six lines. It fits on an index card. It is enough to stop you drifting in the middle and not so much that it drains the fun out of finding things as you go. Plotters can grow it into a full chapter outline. Pantsers can fold it up and only look at it when stuck. Both camps are covered in pantser vs plotter, and if you want the longer version, how to outline a novel walks through it step by step.

Which app should I write in?

Whichever one you will open tomorrow. That is the honest answer, and the rest of this section is detail.

Google Docs is fine. It is free, it saves as you type, and it lives in a browser you already have. Its known weakness is length: writers on Google's own support forum report it slowing down badly around 90,000 words, which is roughly a full novel. Splitting the draft into a document per act or per chapter sidesteps the problem.

Word is fine too. It handles long documents well, exports to everything, and most editors and agents will eventually ask you for a .docx anyway.

Scrivener is the tool serious novelists get told to buy. It is genuinely powerful: chapters as separate cards, research folders, compile to almost any format. It is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, about $60 on desktop with the iOS app sold separately, according to Kindlepreneur's review. That review is also frank about the learning curve, and we agree: it is a lot of app to learn in the same month you are learning to write a book.

What actually matters for a beginner is two things. First, that it saves as you go, without you having to remember. Second, that it lets you take your words out in a normal format whenever you like. Any tool that does both is safe. Any tool that does not do both is a risk, no matter how lovely the interface.

Should I write on my phone?

If that is where the time is, yes. People draft whole novels on phones. The Hyphen on Substack has a good piece on writing a debut novel on your phone, and the spirit of it is that a commute or a school pickup line is a writing session if your draft is in your pocket.

The phone is a poor place to revise and a fine place to add words. Use it for the raw draft, in short bursts, and do the reading-back at a desk later. Whatever app you choose, make sure the phone and the desk see the same draft, so a paragraph typed at the bus stop is waiting for you at home.

How do I keep my draft safe?

This is the part beginners skip and regret. Drafts get lost in ordinary, boring ways: a sync conflict between two devices, a browser tab closed while offline, a laptop that did not wake up. The Scrivener forum has a thread from a writer who lost about a tenth of a draft to a sync error, and Google's forum has one from a writer whose offline edits never saved. Neither did anything unusual. NPR once profiled a novelist who lost a hundred pages to a glitch and had to write them again.

Three habits, none of them hard. Write in something that saves automatically. Keep the draft somewhere that is not only one device. And once a week, export a copy in a plain format, Word or text, and put it somewhere else entirely, named with the date. That is the whole backup plan, and it takes about a minute.

How do I keep going after week two?

Week one runs on excitement. Week two is where most novels quietly end, because the excitement is spent and the habit is not yet built. Three things carry you across.

A daily target, and a small one. Two or three hundred words is a page. Nobody fails at a page. We wrote a whole post on sticking to a daily word count, and the short version is: pick a number you can hit on a bad day.

Days off, chosen in advance. Decide now that Sundays are off, or Fridays, or whatever your life needs. A planned day off is rest. An unplanned one is the start of a lapse, and the whole difference is whether you decided.

A deadline someone else set. November has been the traditional month for this for a long time: 50,000 words in thirty days, which works out to 1,667 a day. You do not have to hit that number. You can pick your own and borrow the calendar. Our guide to writing a novel in 30 days and the free November planner do the arithmetic for you.

Is it still worth writing a novel now?

Yes. Plainly, yes.

We know the worry behind the question. There is more text in the world than there has ever been, a great deal of it generated in seconds, and it is fair to ask whether one more novel, written slowly by one person, can matter. Here is what we would say: nobody has ever written a novel because the world was short of novels. You write one because there is a story only you have, in a voice only you have, and because the person who finishes a draft is not quite the person who started it. None of that changes with how much machine-made text exists.

A book that took a year of mornings carries that year in it. That is not a small thing to be able to say about something you made.

Where Inkling fits (the honest part)

We built Inkling around the three things on the list above, so here is where it helps and where it doesn't.

One place to write: the desk saves your writing to your account as you go, runs in any browser, and installs to a phone home screen, so the bus-stop paragraph and the desk paragraph are the same draft. Every story has a "Previously" recap woven from your own words, for the day you come back after a week away.

A way to keep your notes: character cards, a storyboard, and a map maker sit beside the draft rather than in a second app you have to keep open.

A habit: a writing goal sits on the desk, shows today's number, your running total and your streak, and recalculates the daily target when a day slips, so a missed Tuesday does not become a missed week.

And your words stay yours. Export everything as Word, plain text, or print PDF at any time. The generator never writes your story, switches off with one toggle in Setup, and nothing you write is ever used to train any model. The trial is 14 days with everything unlocked and no card, and if it ends, the desk becomes read-only and nothing is deleted.

Where it does not help: Inkling will not make you sit down. Nothing will. The habit is the one item on the list you have to bring yourself.

If you want the long version of all this, how to write a novel and how to write a book with no experience go step by step. But you do not need them to start. You need a sentence about a person who wants something, a page with six lines on it, an app that saves, and tomorrow morning.