Combine Story Elements to Create
Your Novel's "Master Plan"

The previous step of the Novel Writing Process involved working on the five story elements individually: theme, viewpoint, character, setting, and plot.

It is now time to bring the story elements together again in the form of an overall plan.

Writing a Master Plan for your novel is not an essential step in the Novel Writing Process, but it is one I would highly recommend.

Why? Because it makes the writing itself - or, more precisely, the writing of the first draft - so much simpler.

Writing a first draft is a creative and intuitive process, and having all of the raw material right at your fingertips as you type is a great way to keep the process as free from distraction as possible.

Let's look at what you have written so far in the planning process:

• You have a written the plot, probably quite a complex one.
• You have written character biographies.
• You have fleshed out the setting on paper, and carried out any necessary research.
• You have written a page or two of writing exploring the novel's theme.
• And you have decided on a point of view, though you probably have nothing on paper.

The important point here is that all of these notes on the various story elements are in separate files or folders.

When you come to write Chapter One, you have to look in one file to remind yourself what happens in the plot, another to remind yourself of any essential character traits you want to get across to the reader, and so on. This is far from ideal.

Ideally, when you write the first chapter, you will have everything about that chapter sitting right there in front of you in the form of this Master Plan. That way, you can concentrate on the creative act of writing.

But making life easier for yourself isn't the only purpose of writing a Master Plan. It also allows you to structure your novel.

For example, take the character notes...

What you have written so far, for each major character, is a mini biography. These mini biographies might tell you everything you need to know about each character. But what they don't do is tell you everything you need to know about them in the order that you need to know it.

• You might know that your leading man once served time in jail for burglary, but are you going to disclose this fact in the first chapter or somewhere in the middle of the novel?
• You might know that another character is a closet alcoholic, but are they going to be drunk in their very first scene or act sober for a few chapters before they hit the bottle?

If you don't know these things from the outset, the temptation is to throw all the juicy bits about a character's personality into the very first chapter - and that is entirely the wrong way to tackle Character Creation.

Like I said, creating a Master Plan for your novel isn't essential.

You could write the first draft using nothing but your instincts, and then put right any wrong decisions you might have made during the process of revising the novel.

But in my experience, this can lead to a lot of wasted work, particularly if you don't have the experience of having written a novel before.

How to Combine Story Elements
to Create a Master Plan

If you are reading through this article for the first time, just to get the overall feel for what writing a novel involves, you can skip through the instructions which follow - they're kind of on the detailed side - and move straight onto writing your novel's first draft.

If you are ready to create your Master Plan right here and right now, let's begin by looking at the first of the story elements...

Plot

The plot is the thing that most closely resembles the Master Plan you are aiming to create, in that it is already laid out (more or less) in a chapter-by-chapter format.

The plot outline you have already written, therefore, forms the starting point for the Master Plan. All you have to do is...

1. Add a little more structure to the plot (more on that in a moment)
2. Add the remaining story elements to it

...and you are done!

(Incidentally, this whole process is clearly much easier to do on a word processor than in longhand. And don't worry if you are confused right now; everything should be clear by the end.)

What do I mean by "adding structure" to the plot? Well, your plot at the moment is basically a long list of events. But some of these events will be more important than others...

• Some, you will want to devote a lot of attention to. You will want to make them into a dramatic "scene".
• Others are not so important. They might be crucial to the reader's understanding of the overall story, but dramatically they are - well, kind of boring! These events you can deal with in the form of "narrative summary".

Scenes (the interesting bits) are "shown" to the reader and summary (the dull bits) are "told". Going through your plot and deciding which bits to show and which bits to tell is the job that faces you here.

(Don't worry, it isn't half as complicated or as time-consuming as it sounds, and you will find full instructions on how to do it in the section on Structuring Narrative Writing.)

Now for the next of the story elements. Actually, two of them at once...

Theme and Viewpoint

The reason I am dealing with these two story elements together is that there is very little work to do on either of them.

Yippee!

Theme (and symbolism, too) happens more organically than by design. Earlier in this 9-Step Novel Writing Process, you wrote out a page or two of notes on what you want the novel to "say", and this is usually enough. Having planted the thematic seeds in your mind, as it were, the theme should simply emerge without you even having to think about it.

Having said that, it is not a bad idea at this stage to re-read those notes and then run through the plot outline to add any comments that occur to you along the way.

If you come across a scene, for example, which lies at the very heart of what the novel is about thematically, add some notes to the outline to remind yourself to pay close attention to getting the theme across when you write the scene.

Generally, though, there will be very little to do here.

With viewpoint, too, there will not be much to add to the plot outline.

You have either decided to write the novel in first person or third person point of view (or possibly one of the less common alternatives), and that is all there is to it.

If you have chosen to write a Multiple Viewpoint Novel, you will want to go through the plot outline and make sure that every chapter is clearly labeled with the viewpoint character's name (Charlie narrates Chapter 1, Ethel Chapter 2, and so on...)

Otherwise, move on to the next of the story elements...

Character

Now the work begins again.

Having character notes to hand when you write the first draft of a chapter is vital. The character might be alive in your head, but you are never going to remember all the details and traits and personal histories you created for them.

Added to that, you haven't yet worked out how you will make each character come to life on the page, as you write the novel.

You need to decide what you will say about a character in the first chapter, what you will say about them in the second chapter, and so on, all the way to the end, so that their personalities are revealed gradually to the readers throughout the novel.

This is crucial. If you say everything there is to say about a fictional character in their very first scene, you will have two problems...

1. The scene will suffer from a serious case of information overload.
2. The character will have lost their ability to develop, preferably in unexpected ways, as the story unfolds.

So, your job here is to work out how the character develops on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and then add these notes to the Master Plan, so that the information is right there in front of you when you come to write each chapter.

How, precisely, do you achieve this chapter-by-chapter revelation of character? Simple - you read this article: Bringing Fictional Characters to Life.

Setting

And so to the last of the story elements we need to work into the Master Plan.

Setting, as you probably know by now, is very similar to a character in a novel. And as a writer, you deal with it in a very similar way.

With characters, you took the mini biographies and worked out how to portray each character to the readers so that their personalities were gradually revealed through the story.

With setting, you take your notes and do exactly the same thing - deciding what to reveal about the setting in each chapter, from the first to the last.

Once again, there is an article in the Setting section which will help you to achieve precisely this: Bringing Story Settings to Life.

Finishing Touches

Nearly there now!

We have successfully combined all of the story elements into a single Master Plan, but there are three small things left to do before you are ready to write...

First, you need to organize the Master Plan into chapters (although you might have already done this, without even thinking about it, when you wrote the plot).

You might also want to divide your novel into "parts", or consider including a prologue or an epilogue.

You will find more information on all of these things in this article: Anatomy of a Novel: Chapters Etc.

Second, you will want to give your novel a title (if you haven't done so already). Also, are you going to give each chapter a title, or simply number them? Read the article on Finding Novel Titles for more.

Third, you need to be 100% clear about the chronology of events.

Each chapter in your novel takes place at a different time, and lasts for a different length. When you create the Master Plan, be sure to label each chapter with this vital information.

And I don't mean in a vague way, but specifically - down to the last minute and second if this information is important.

Why all this precision? Put simply, it will stop you making any stupid mistakes...

• Like having a woman give birth only three months after conception.
• Or saying "five days later" when actually a week has passed.
• Or making a thirty-minute car journey last all afternoon.

And, no, I am not exaggerating here. Without specific days and times written down on the Master Plan, making howlers like these is a lot easier than you'd think.

Another bonus of great organization is that knowing specific days and times will help you to add authenticity to you novel, because you will be able to link the time line of the novel to real-world events...

• If a character is watching the news, for example, you will be able to check back and see what made the headlines that day.
• Or if a couple watch a movie on their first date, you will be able to check what film was actually showing that week.

Taking an hour or two to note precisely on the Master Plan when everything takes place is a lot simpler to do now than after you have written the first draft and possibly made some terrible blunders.

And that is that.

You have now combined the five story elements into an overall Master Plan and added a few finishing touches to it.

Like I said at the top, skipping this step of the Novel Writing Process is certainly an option (though you will have to do the work eventually, when you revise your novel). But I truly believe that creating a Master Plan makes the process of writing the first draft much easier and much more enjoyable.

And what is the point of writing a novel if you don't enjoy it?