Good advice for starting a light novel?

[Mechavomit]

I've never actually written anything (mostly because I can't write to save my life), but I've had stories "made up" countless times.
I find it easier to actually have a friend, who's "in", whom you can talk to about your story at any time, someone to geek over it with you. You start casually sharing ideas and the whole thing becomes more natural.

[Froge]

For me, the main reason why I try and avoid preparation is because once I have every detail of a story planned, the writing process becomes less about the spark of creativity and more about just copying those details in my head into written prose. It takes a lot of grit and determination to get through it all.

[Cuyir]

You shouldn't be trying to "copy paste" from the preparation stuff. You should just have rough ''sketches'' from which to work on. I go from ''scenes'' and work the story in a natural manner. I try envision how I can get x character in y location for this or that scene or how to implant the motivation or whatever.

[Froge]

Clearly we have different definitions of preparation.

After getting the concepts down (eg. character motivations, x to y, etc.) in my head, I will spend some time enacting out entire story scenes in my head with exact prose and dialogue, because I just can't resist the creative urge. Then when I actually have the opportunity to write that scene down I suddenly become bored because I've played through it so many times in my head already. This is pretty much my definition of preparation.

[Bridge]

For me, the main reason why I try and avoid preparation is because once I have every detail of a story planned, the writing process becomes less about the spark of creativity and more about just copying those details in my head into written prose. It takes a lot of grit and determination to get through it all.

There's no avoiding that. It's busywork, but you just have to try to make it fun I guess. The end result will be so much better if you have it planned out than if you wing it.

EDIT: On the subject of copy-pasting, many of the old masters worked exactly like that. In the field of music, Mozart and Vivaldi for example wrote fully orchestrated compositions in their head before committing them to paper. No doubt there were problems that needed to be solved while doing so, but they had everything planned to the smallest detail so that they had the most control over their work as possible.

[Cuyir]

Ah, I see chrono. I thought you literally copy pasted stuff in a amalgam of words and then tried to make sense of it, haha.

But yes, planning is very important, otherwise you could be staring into the ceiling/sky/whatever for awhile thinking ''what am I going to write about?" when you've sat down to write.

[TheWalshinator]

Make sure you have PLENTY of spare time to do so, as well as a lot of patience, and a bit of imagination
Writing takes all these things.

[Red]

Good ones!

But i'll add something to the line myself,by adding something i've already done:

I've praticed my writing style, by rewriting scenes from movies. I just normally wached the movie, and then started to rewatch it,descride the scenes by writing and adding the existing dialogs.
If the movie already has a novel or a book, you can compare your outcome with it.

[Bridge]

Good ones!

But i'll add something to the line myself,by adding something i've already done:

I've praticed my writing style, by rewriting scenes from movies. I just normally wached the movie, and then started to rewatch it,descride the scenes by writing and adding the existing dialogs.
If the movie already has a novel or a book, you can compare your outcome with it.

That's pretty good practice if you ask me. Even better is taking existing characters and maybe even existing scenes and writing completely new lines and take the story in a different direction. This will make you more proficient at actually writing characters in a consistent way and make you more attentive to details and themes, whereas the imagination part is something that will come after you study a wide range of different characters. But I definitely like what you're doing now, especially if you pay attention to the themes and try to express everything that the movie cannot do with ease (or at all).

[Red]

I also noticed that writing seems pretty tiresome and exhausting.