Novel help...?

I've been there. Oh Lord, how I've been there...

My first novel (which I finally finished a couple years back...you think the writing's hard, just wait 'til you have to shop it around!) was a series of starts, stops, rewrites and cold feet for many years. I'd do 30-50 pages, reread it, say "This sucks", and start over almost from scratch. Then my husband, who had been watching me struggle, said, "Just write. Let it flow. Don't go back and start voer, just keep going until you reach the end." Hard advice for me, but I did it, and though it still took a while, I was happy enough with the result that there were only minor changes in the second draft and polish.

So first bit of advice is just keep going and don't look back. Second bit of advice is plan loose: I rarely do full outlines, more like jotting down a rough idea of where I'm going (sometimes just a piece of paper with phrases on it, like chapter headings so I can remember what beats I'd like to hit). You can't be too loose because then you might meander all over the place with no real plot, and that's worse than planning too tight.

That's a question for you: do you have a plot? What do you want to say/show/experience with this novel of yours? If you just sat down one day and said, "I'm going to write a book"...well, great for you, but that's like sitting in your car and saying, "I'm going to drive somewhere" without deciding which direction you're going to point the car in. Could be an interesting drive, or you could make a series of left turns and end up where you started. To tell a story, you have to know where you're going to some minor degree, or else you're just rambling, and nobody wants to listen to someone who rambles on and on and never gets to the point.

Third bit of advice echoes Charlie's: pay attention to your characters. If you've developed them enough in your head, you should have a good idea of what's right/wrong for them. Are you trying to make them do things that aren't proper for them? Maybe that's why your keep running out of steam. Sit down and think about them for a bit. One trick I did early on for my book was to write 5-10 pages of first-person narrative for a couple of the peripherial characters, literally having them tell me who they were and what their lives were like before they became involved in the situations in my novel. I still have them, and I flip through them for fun sometimes -- things have changed a bit in some areas of their backstory, but it was a great way for me to get a handle on them.