Novel Writing in Manageable Steps
Break your Novel Writing into Specific Tasks
Writing a novel can be broken into manageable steps that will lead to a finished book.
Writing an entire fiction book can seem like a daunting task, one that will be overwhelming if you’ve never written more than a short story or article. But it’s important to see writing a novel as a series of steps, rather than one long marathon.
First, if you intend to become a published author, there is so much more than just the writing involved. Divide your goal into all of the separate tasks that go into it.
Novel Tasks
- Research: you can read research books anywhere, but if some of your research comes from the internet, consider printing off articles; then, when you have a moment, you can use a highlighter pen to mark off interesting or important facts you can use.
- Character creation: Not many characters spring from the writer’s mind in one piece. Use a Character Questionnaire and in stray moments jot down bits and pieces of what you know about them.
- Plotting: This difficult step is time consuming and will never come to you in one piece anyway. Keep the plot in your mind and jot down ideas along the way.
- Planning: Slightly different from plotting, planning is finding ways to connect all of the plot elements.
- Outlining: Turning your plot into a cohesive and logical outline to follow as you write… some writers do it, some don’t.
- Writing: Writing pieces in a notebook as you go along can help when you do have time to sit down at a computer.
- Synopsis writing: This brief explanation of your book can be written anywhere, as it should only be a few pages and may take several drafts to get right.
- Writing query letters: Finding just the right way to phrase your plot in a couple of paragraphs is an important part of your query letter and can be done anywhere.
Devote some time to each, with the bulk of your time scheduled for the actual writing of the novel.
Writing in Brief
To break that actual writing down further into smaller pieces, consider these tips:
- Think of your novel in terms of scenes, rather than chapters.
- If you don’t have time to write a complete scene, map it out in point form, so when you come back to it you’ll know exactly where you’re going.
- Strike while the iron is hot… in other words, when the scene does come together in your head, try to get as much of it written as you can, leaving polishing for another time.
- Don’t be bound into writing in a linear fashion; if you have an idea for a scene that occurs further on in the book, write that, file it with a descriptive file name, and use it when the time comes.
If you use some - or all - of these tips and break your novel into smaller chunks, rather than being intimidated by the huge undertaking writing a novel can seem, you will find your way to ‘The End’ before you know it.
For more tips on novel writing for busy folks, see: Scheduling Time to Write
