How to Write a Novel

How to Write a Novel

Writing a good novel is hard. That's just life. Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. The best one for you is the one that works for you.

Here is a method, that worked for one of the writers to create 9 best-sellers and brought him numerous awards.

Before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn't kill your desire to actually write the story. One easy way to do it is to make a book online, and save time.

When you have sketches of your novel, start 10 step program.

Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. So make the best one you can!

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. You can use this paragraph in your proposal. Ideally, this paragraph will have about five sentences.

Step 3) Now you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. Characters are the most important part of any novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten-fold when you start writing. For each of your major characters, take an hour and write a one-page summary sheet that tells about character's name, life, motion, character and faith during the novel.

It doesn't have to be perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. You can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better.

Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph.

Step 5) Take a day or two and write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These "character synopses" should tell the story from the point of view of each character. Editors love character synopses, because editors love character-based fiction.

Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.

Step 7) Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel.

Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you've got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you'll need to turn the story into a novel. Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.

Step 9) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene.

This process usually take a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document.

Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage.