Writing My First Novel: My Journey So Far (Bonus Cover Reveal!)

Writing my first novel is something I have wanted to do for as long as I can remember. 

It is also something that, for most of my life, felt far too enormous to actually begin. A novel wasn’t just a few characters and a good idea. It was an entire world, tens of thousands of words and, apparently, quite a few spreadsheets. 

Now, after years of collecting scattered ideas and months of writing, that novel is finally beginning to feel real. I have characters, chapters and an ever-growing collection of lore. I’ve even created a temporary concept cover, which I’m excited to share later in the post as a small added bonus. 

Long before any of that existed, though, there was some questionable RuneScape fanfiction written in the back of a scrapbook. 

Before Writing My First Novel

I remember being around 13, sitting on holiday in Spain and writing RuneScape fanfiction across the multicoloured pages of a scrapbook. 

It probably wasn’t very good. In fact, I’m fairly confident it wasn’t. It was my first real attempt at storytelling, though, and part of me wishes I still had it so I could read it back and laugh at whatever my teenage mind came up with. 

Around the same time, I wrote little stories about fictional adventures involving me and my school friends. I also made a slightly more serious attempt at writing a science-fiction novel while I was in secondary school. I only managed the first few pages, but I still have them somewhere in my archive should I ever feel brave enough to revisit them. 

Maybe one day. 

Where the Ideas Came From

I think my interest in writing came from the sheer number of books I read during my adolescence. I was never particularly outgoing, and that was probably never more apparent than during those early years. Instead of going out, I would spend hours in my room reading and rereading books such as Skulduggery Pleasant and Percy Jackson. 

I would completely disappear into those worlds, imagining what it would be like to live in them and picturing the adventures I might have if I did. 

Looking back, I’m not sure part of me ever entirely left them. 

Fragments of the books, games and films I loved remained somewhere in my imagination and gradually began influencing ideas of my own. They weren’t always especially original. Sometimes I would imagine a Star Wars fanfiction or a Skulduggery Pleasant spin-off. Other times, I would invent some lore or imagine a new piece of content that could be added to RuneScape. 

I spent a lot of time daydreaming as a child. It was something I regularly got into trouble for at school, and honestly, it is still something I can get carried away with as an adult. 

I think, in a way, I have always known that I wanted to create a world of my own. 

God knows my parents told me often enough that I spent too much time in it. 

Turning Years of Notes Into a Novel 

The ideas continued long after I stopped writing those early stories. 

In my first job, I worked in a small stationery shop. During the quiet periods between customers, I would take a sheet of A4 paper, fold it several times and carefully tear it into smaller pages. I would then staple them together to create a tiny homemade notepad. 

Throughout the day, I filled those pages with ideas for characters, stories or individual scenes. They could come from almost anywhere and were usually influenced by whatever game I was playing or whatever film or television series I had recently watched. 

Most of those handmade notepads ended up in a drawer as soon as I got home. 

Not long before I moved out, I came across them all again. There were years of scattered thoughts sitting in this collection of roughly cut pieces of paper, and something in me couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. 

Instead, I copied everything into an A5 journal. 

That journal became the first consolidated home for all my ideas. I still didn’t actually do anything with them, of course. They simply moved from lots of tiny notebooks into one slightly larger notebook. 

Progress, I suppose. 

From Notebooks to a Word Document

At some point, everything moved again, this time into a Word document. Over the following years, as I started reading more regularly, that document grew into an increasingly disorganised collection of characters, scenes, lore and half-formed concepts. 

Eventually, I split it into two sections: one for science-fiction ideas and another for fantasy. 

At the time, I was reading through the Riftwar Cycle, which resonated with me quite heavily. Of the two sections, it was the fantasy ideas that interested me most, and that part of the document continued to grow. 

The real turning point came during a catch-up with one of my friends. We were talking about our goals and discovered that we both wanted to write novels. The difference was that he had actually started his and was already close to finishing it. 

It was a strangely sudden but incredibly inspiring moment. 

For the first time, I had someone I knew personally who I could talk to about writing a book. Seeing his passion and hearing about his progress became a huge source of encouragement. 

Eventually, I decided to take the plunge and begin writing my first fantasy novel. 

Six Months to Write 500 Words 

Making the decision was the easy part. 

Actually starting was much harder. 

As I mentioned in my return post, it took me roughly six months to write the first 500 words. I would write something, question it, rewrite it and then convince myself it wasn’t good enough. 

Then I would delete it and begin again. 

I was treating every sentence as though it needed to be the finished version. Instead of allowing myself to explore the story, I was judging everything before it had been given the chance to develop. 

Unsurprisingly, that made writing incredibly difficult. 

I couldn’t tell you exactly what changed, but I eventually broke through that barrier. Almost all at once, I went from struggling to write a few hundred words across several months to producing more than a thousand words in a single sitting. 

The biggest difference was accepting that a first draft didn’t need to be perfect. 

It didn’t even need to be particularly good. 

Once I understood that, I began enjoying the process far more. The story started moving, the characters felt more real and writing stopped feeling like a test I was constantly failing. 

There are still days when I write something that, honestly, is awful. Some of it will need rewriting, and entire scenes may eventually disappear. 

But that can happen later. 

At the moment, the important thing is to keep the story moving. 

Building the World of Fellwatch 

Writing the story has only been one part of the experience. I have also completely fallen in love with fantasy worldbuilding. 

I enjoy sitting down and asking questions about the world. What does it look like? Who lives there? What do they value? What happened in its past, and how does that continue to affect the people living there now? 

The best part is that I wasn’t beginning entirely from scratch. I already had years of notes, characters and half-developed concepts that I could use directly or take inspiration from. 

One idea would lead to a question, that question would produce another idea, and slowly the world around the story began expanding. 

Over the last nine months, I have written almost 150 pages of raw ideas and lore for it. 

The funniest part is that I probably won’t use most of it. Not in the first novel, anyway. 

As the world developed, I realised many of its characters, conflicts and stories extended far beyond a single book. Before long, one novel had somehow turned into the beginnings of an entire fantasy saga. 

Because of course it did. 

I’m not getting ahead of myself and committing to writing all of it. I still need to finish the first book before making any grand claims about an enormous series. 

However, building the world has made the project far larger and more exciting than I expected when I began. It also led to another part of the process that made the novel feel much more real. 

Creating its cover. 

Creating the Concept Cover for The Ashes of Fellwatch 

Writing a novel is a long process, and although I’m enjoying it, there are times when writing chapter after chapter can become repetitive. 

Because of that, I’ve tried to find other creative parts of the project to work on whenever I need a change of pace. Worldbuilding has been a huge part of that, but one of the things I was most excited to try was creating a cover. 

Not the final cover, necessarily. I am nowhere near the point where I need one of those. 

What I wanted was a temporary piece of concept art that would make the novel feel more tangible. 

Until then, The Ashes of Fellwatch existed almost entirely as words inside documents. There was the manuscript, the outlines and nearly 150 pages of increasingly excessive lore, but it still felt like something hidden away on my computer. 

Giving it a cover gave it an identity. 

Why I Used AI for the Concept Cover

Now, brace yourself for a potentially controversial decision. 

I am a hopeless artist. 

I might have been able to draw when I was younger, but it certainly isn’t a skill I have maintained into adulthood. Because of that, I leaned on the technological marvel of AI to help fill the gap. 

I know some people strongly disagree with using AI-generated artwork, and there is a much larger ethical conversation surrounding it. I firmly believe that we need to support human artists. Human experience and emotion are fundamental parts of creativity, and they cannot simply be replicated by asking a machine to imitate the finished result. 

I’ve previously written about some of my wider thoughts on AI, which you can read here. 

For this project, though, AI gave me a way to create temporary concept artwork that could help me visualise the finished book. It isn’t necessarily the cover I would use if the novel were published, and I would love to work with a human artist on the final professional artwork one day. 

For now, it gives the project a face. 

Designing the Cover

I already had a rough idea of what I wanted. For whatever reason, I found myself heavily inspired by the skill and spell books from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I have always loved their simplicity: a strong border around the outside and a single recognisable symbol in the centre. 

I wanted something similarly simple and striking. 

By this point, I had settled on the title The Ashes of Fellwatch, so the cover needed to represent both the location and what happens to it. At the centre, I imagined the torn and burning banner of Fellwatch, surrounded by drifting embers. 

It took quite a few attempts to get close to the picture I had in my head. Even now, I don’t think it is completely finished. There are details I would still like to adjust, and I need to spend time researching current fantasy bestsellers and cover trends to understand how a final version might fit within today’s market. 

As a piece of concept art, however, it has already achieved exactly what I wanted. 

It made the novel feel real. 

Seeing the title and imagery together transformed it from an enormous Word document into something that looked, even if only briefly, like an actual book. That has been hugely motivating, particularly on the days when the end of the first draft still feels impossibly far away. 

So, without further ado, I’m incredibly proud to share the concept cover for my first novel: 

The Ashes of Fellwatch 

It may not be the final cover, but it represents the world I’ve spent the last year building and the story I am finally beginning to tell. 

For now, that makes it feel pretty special. 

What Writing My First Novel Has Taught Me

The cover isn’t the only thing that has helped make the project feel more tangible. 

Writing a novel is enormous, and it can be difficult to recognise your progress while you are buried somewhere in the middle of it. To help with that, I created a small Excel spreadsheet that I update after every writing session. 

I record how long I spent writing and my word count at the end. It then calculates how many words I added and keeps a running total of both my writing time and the overall length of the manuscript. 

As I write this, I have spent more than 66 hours working on the novel, and I am barely 20 per cent of the way through it. 

I am writing epic fantasy, so I always expected the book to be substantial. Even so, my first act currently sits at around 47,000 words, which is horribly wordy and will need to be trimmed considerably during editing. 

That is a future problem. 

Right now, it still feels incredible to know that I have written that much. 

The process has also taught me a lot about the way I create. My friend is now editing his novel, and his writing process is completely different from mine. It has been fascinating comparing how our stories have developed. 

Architect vs Gardener

I would describe myself as more of an Architect, whereas he is more of a Gardener. 

Building the world and creating a framework had to come first for me. I wanted to understand the setting, characters and larger events surrounding them before I felt comfortable moving forwards.

My friend’s approach is more organic. He allows the story to grow while he writes and discovers more of it through the process. 

Honestly, the fact that I took the Architect approach probably shouldn’t surprise me. Planning, structuring and building frameworks seem to be core parts of how I approach most things. 

Apparently, even my imaginary worlds need proper documentation. 

That said, the story still manages to surprise me. Regardless of how much I outline, the characters occasionally take a conversation somewhere unexpected or an unplanned idea appears halfway through a scene. 

The framework helps me know where I’m going, but the journey continues to change along the way. 

For Years, I Wanted to Write a Novel 

I am still a long way from finishing The Ashes of Fellwatch. 

Once the first draft is complete, I will need to read through the entire thing, work out what makes sense, identify what absolutely does not and begin editing it into something coherent. 

The first act will definitely need to lose a few words. 

Probably quite a lot of them. 

But I’m proud of how far I have already come. I went from spending six months trying to produce 500 perfect words to reaching a point where the story can flow for thousands of words at a time. 

For years, my stories existed as disconnected notes inside handmade booklets, journals and Word documents. Now there are tens of thousands of words following the same characters through the same world. 

There is even a cover. 

Whether the novel eventually becomes something I publish, something I share with a handful of people or simply an enormous document I am personally proud of, I don’t know yet. 

For now, I’m enjoying creating the world I always wanted to disappear into. 

Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Would you carefully plan your world like an Architect, or discover the story as you went along like a Gardener?