A little at a time, a few pages a day. Slow and steady gets you there, as you already know.

However, if you’ve stopped for three years, perhaps your muse on this one is sulking and/or your internal pressure to write it has shifted, or your point of view changed.

Maybe you should start on a second.

Don’t view the first one as a mistake. It’s all practice. Sometimes you have to write a whole novel before realizing that’s not the one you really are compelled to write., Perhaps you got off easy!

Laurence Blocks book on novel writing is pretty good. And William Zinnser’s On Writing Well is terrific regardless of genre.

an entire novel to know it’s not the one you want to write. A learning experience, sure, but it seems like a hell of a lot of effort to learn that lesson. But what do I know?

I’d say work on the old one for 15 minutes a day for a week or so and you’ll know if you want to continue. And if you spend all day on a computer maybe you want to try recording notes on a portable recorder of some sort. Or maybe try working with a stick in the dirt. Hokey, yep, but maybe it’ll get something started and it’s nice and slow, you’ll have lots of time to think about what you’re writing, and you’ll be outside (I assume) and if anything really starts to cook you can always move on to more complex technologies, like pen and notebook. Moleskines make you want to write something….

instead of sitting down to write your novel, just think about it when walking. as in think about sentences or ideas of your story or aspects of building your characters or formal things. then perhaps when you sit down to write, you will have something to do.

and i do find that walking is an excellent place to think creatively.