You may even have begun a novel, or have a draft of one finished. A Practical Plan for Impractical Dreams To want to write a novel, you need only an idea and a yearning. Yet in truth none of them are very objective at all. Having that many pages of a novel makes writing the rest much more possible. That's a fairly sensible-sounding rule, except that it isn't always true.
Reliable rules are perfect for doing things that others already did.
Our predecessors made some mistakes and built the rules to save us the trouble. But we're talking about novels here. So much for relying on rules. Nobody every wrote your novel. Brand new mistakes await you.