The Novel Writing Process 5 - Continued

Plot

During the fourth step of the Novel Writing Process - writing a novel outline - I suggested that you expand your plot into a beginning, an ending, and a few key events (or milestones) along the way. In the fifth step of the writing process, you need to draw up a far more detailed plot outline.

How? Simply by following all of the advice in the section on How to Plot a Novel.

In particular, you will find here my 10-Step Guide to Plotting a Novel, which sets out, in a very nuts-and-bolts kind of way, how to plot your way from the first page of a novel to the last. Also here, you will find plenty of other advice on how to write a plot to a professional standard, including:

• How to write a story that hooks
• How to add subplots
• How to foreshadow the novel's key events

How detailed you make the plot, before you begin to write, is entirely up to you...

• Some writers like to know just the bare bones of each chapter before they write it - where it begins, where it ends and a few key events in between.

• Other writers will happily write pages and pages of notes for each chapter before attempting to write it in prose form.

(More on this later.)

Setting

Creating a setting for your novel is very similar to creating characters - you need to get to know it before you start writing.

What you need to do during this fifth stage of the Novel Writing Process, then, is to flesh it out on paper - largely through writing descriptions of the town and the buildings and so on, but you may also want to make maps and take photographs.

A lot of the setting can be built using local knowledge and your imagination but, depending on the novel you have in mind, there may also be a lot of technical research to do here.

You will find instructions on how to do all these things in the setting section: Writing a Story with Atmosphere.

Final Thoughts

And that is the end of Step 5 of the Novel Writing Process. Not so long ago, you had a one-sentence idea. You now have a chapter-by-chapter plot outline and supplementary notes on characters, setting, and theme. Oh, and not only do you know which point of view you will be using, you have a deep understanding of the theory behind viewpoint.

Most importantly, all of the elements are working together.

A word of caution, though: the chances of the novel ending up precisely the way you envisage it at the moment are slim. As you get to know more about the novel through writing a first draft, and then revising that draft, it will almost certainly change in small, and perhaps large, ways.

Writing a novel is like that. I have tried to make the 9-Step Novel Writing Process as straightforward as I can, but the fact is that no system for writing fiction can ever be perfect.

Just because you have completed the detailed planning, for example, it doesn't mean you won't have to revisit the plan often to do some fine (or some not-so-fine) tuning. For more on this, keep reading...

Next: Why Writing a Novel isn't Like Baking a Cake