How to write a great novel - writing habits of famous authors

They write. Skip this article and go write.

What strikes me is that they seem to lose much time fighting procrastination.

Interestingly, very few of those approaches can be directly mapped to software. Bulletin boards, graph-paper notebooks with revisions written as speech bubbles, "auditioning" characters ... how do you wade through such immense amount of data on a computer?<p>I only know of one app (for the Mac) called Scrivener that gives the author some freedom to develop a story visually instead of as a wall of text.

It's sad that "how to write a great novel" sounds a lot more appealing than the much more befitting "writing habits of famous authors."

Interesting to note that so many still hand write there drafts on paper. It would be hard as a full time novelist to avoid distraction, I guess for some this is a way of avoiding the distraction of a computer hooked up to the outside world.

I've always admired writing for the same reason I like programming - having such wide limits on what can be created. However, I envy book writers because I feel they are even less constrained.

I have this feeling that most of what they do don't really matter that much, but is more of a habit that works for them, but not necessarily something that would work for a new writter.