The Quick Guide to the Novel Writing Process

Although I have expanded the novel writing process into many steps in the detailed version of this article (How to Write a Novel Step-by-Step), there are really only 3 essential steps to write a novel...

1. Planning
2. Writing
3. Revising

I'll be talking about what to do during each step in just a moment, but the first thing you need to understand is that there is no escaping the "planning" phase of the novel writing process.

A lot of people skip the planning part and launch straight into writing the first draft. Now, this is fine if it's the way you want to work, but understand that...

You will still need to plan the novel in your head as you write the first draft, and that isn't easy to do - particularly if you are new to novel writing.

And you will have to do even more planning during the revision part of the writing process - because writing a first draft "on the wing" nearly always results in a messy and unstructured novel.

That is why I always advise people to follow my steps to write a book in the order they are given - to do plenty of planning up front, in other words.

But you must always do what works for you personally.

Anyway, here is my "quick guide" to the steps...

The Step-by-Step Novel Writing Process

1. Prepare for the journey ahead. Most importantly, decide on your motivation for writing a novel. Remember that writing a book for the sheer pleasure of doing it, day after day, is much more powerful than the possibility of financial gain at the end of the process.
2. Decide what type of novel to write. The best advice is to always write the type of book you like to read. Better still, write the novel you would ideally like to read, but can't because nobody else has written it yet.
3. Find an idea. Actually, find lots of writing ideas and choose the best. Don't settle on an idea until it has you buzzing with excitement.
4. Decide if you prefer planning or writing. This is what I was talking about above. Whether you spend a few months on the planning stages of the novel writing process, or whether you start on the first draft after the bare minimum of planning (and resign yourself to a very messy first draft) is the decision you must now take.
5. Plan your novel in depth. This involves working on the 5 main elements of a novel separately: Theme, Viewpoint, Character, Setting, and Plot.
6. Create a "master plan". Having worked on the elements separately, it is now time to weave them all together again. The main idea here is that it makes the actual writing part of the novel writing process so much simpler.
7. Write the first draft. Here, you have the choice of writing a draft for the entire novel before revising a word of it, or of drafting and editing each chapter in turn.
8. Edit your novel. The first part of revising a novel consists of looking at WHAT you have said - in terms of plot, characterization, and so on. (The less planning you did at the outset, the more work there will be to do here.) The second part is revising HOW you have said it - the language, in other words.
9. Find a publisher. Or if you can't find a "traditional" publisher (or don't want to find one), consider the exciting opportunities available to writers to self-publish online. (See Getting a Book Published in the 21st Century for more.)

And that is it.

Remember that this step-by-step novel writing process - which you can read in more detail in the section on How to Write a Novel - is only a guide. Feel free to adapt it in any way you like.

Just don't do what many novel writing beginners do, and that is trying to write a book without any kind of plan whatsoever. Most of those writers tend to abandon their projects somewhere around chapter three and go do something else with their lives.

Next Up: The Quick Guide to the 3 Types of Fiction...