The first 400 words of my novel, Adjustments, were written mostly to prove to my publisher, who had asked for the story, that I had no novel to write. I was a non-fiction, just-the-facts writer who had read little fiction as an adult, let alone had any interest in writing it.
The next 138,000 or so words were written to outrun the plot bearing down on me like a gravel truck on the highway. My publisher, unconvinced of my alleged novel-writing improbability, not only encouraged me to continue (and I, apparently, acquiesced), but once several thousand words and the faintest outlines of a real plot had started to take shape, she began to publish the story online in serial installments.
"It's the way Dickens got things going," she said. "It'll work out fine."