Here are two ways you can help him:

1) Break it down into 'do-able' bits. If someone writes one page a day, which doesn't seem that hard, then at the end of a year he'll have 365 pages. This is a novel!

2) Track down a copy of Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird, a book about how it's perfectly okay and normal to write what Lamott calls 'shi*y" first drafts. Your husband needs to understand that his novel won't be perfect. First drafts are usually horrid, even for those of us who write for a living. So he might as well just relax and have fun. You can't make a novel good, however, until you finish it. It's best to not revise, but just keep going, using that excitement of living in the moment in his story, of focusing on what he's writing now, not on what he's already written.

Good luck!

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