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The thing you have to understand about writing a novel is, it's impossible. It can't be done by any method known to science. 

Sure, you can try writing an outline. It won't have any heart. Your characters will be flat as cardboard. You can try writing character biographies. Then you novel will be a bunch of resumes going for a walk. 

It's not that all the stuff they tell you in the books is wrong (though a lot of it is wrong). It is that the novel is a kind of strange alchemy. A good novel gives the reader the sense that they are having an experience, one that feels as real as a lived experience (only safer and more interesting -- live without the pain and the boring bits). But it does this with nothing more than a flow of words. 

Why does one flow of words create the equivalent of an experience and the next just create a bunch of information that isn't actually true. We don't quite know. Compare two books, one that works and one that is just words. What's the difference? You won't be able to put your finger on it. You will see it and feel it, but try to define the difference, try to define the mechanism by which words become experience, and why an almost identical flow of words just stay words, and you won't be able to do it. 

A great writer has a sense of drama, a sense of the few very particular details that somehow create the illusion of a real character, a real forest, a real home. It is alchemy. None of this stuff is real. It is a walking dream. It is a mirage, a figure in the corner of they eye, a will-o'-the-wisp. 

No one can know if they have that alchemy in them. I have no idea if we all have it or only a tiny few. But you will have to dig it out from under a huge pile of false starts and ignorance and self indulgence. You will have to discover the structures and techniques that build the framework within which the alchemy is contained and released to do its work. And that requires just a whole lot of work. A whole lot of reading -- reading with attention, trying to see both the technique and the alchemy of great authors, how and why they do things -- and then a whole bunch of writing -- deliberate, thoughtful writing. 

And your writing is going to suck for a long time. You might not keep at it long enough. You might not try hard enough. You might be lazy or not self-critical enough. You might not listen when people tell you that your works sucks, or try to figure out why it sucks and fix it. But if you persevere through the long hard grind, you might produce something worth reading. Or, more likely I'm afraid, you never will. 

Or you might be one of those savant writers who turns out works of genius on their first try. But if you were, chances are you would not have the doubts that lead to your asking this question. 

You need the alchemy. Either it is there at your fingertips just waiting for you to start typing, or it isn't there at all and never will be, or it is buried under a huge pile of crap and you will have to dig long and hard to get down to it. But there is no guarantee that there is alchemy buried under every huge pile of crap. Sometimes it is just crap all the way down. 

Whichever of those things it is, though, there is only one way to find out, and that is to sit down and start digging. 

Or not, because this business is a long slow grind with very little chance of success and still less chance of ever making a living, and, frankly, if you can do anything else with your life without suffering a deep anguish of the soul, you should. 

Because we writers are all Prometheus, trying to bring fire from the gods to men, chained to a rock, having our liver eaten by an eagle. 

You have been warned.