Tips for Planning Your Novel Part 2

When writing your first novel, it is always good to have a plan.  You need a map that helps you know where you are and where you are going.

I mentioned in my last blog that a good place to start in your planning is to get a notebook or binder and to create three main sections in it: plot, characters, and outline.  

Here in your notebook you can write freely about the plot ideas that pop into your head. As a result, your plotting section can grow to be many pages, which is why binders are helpful.

Plotting helps you work through the scenes and events that will ultimately communicate the point of your story.  Think back to your favorite novel or movie.  What was the theme? What events occurred in the story that helped to communicate the theme?

Simply put, plotting is crafting the story so that it makes your point. 

Once you have decided on your problem situation you can begin to think more clearly about your characters. Here you can start jotting down ideas for your characters including their names. 

This may seem unimportant, but the names you pick can be significant, as novelist and creative writing professor Phyllis Whitney points out in her book Guide to Fiction Writing. She writes how she slipped up in Listen for the Whisperer by using the names Leigh and Laura. By the time she realized the confusion it created, it was too late to make any changes. 

Some writers, she says, fall into a first-letter obsession without realizing it.  For instance, using Jim, John, and Jack in the same story may cause the reader to spend extra energy keeping them straight.

To keep from doing this in your story, I suggest writing down a list of all the first and last names of your characters and going through them to make sure you are not using too many names that start with the same letter.

You can also begin the process of getting to know your characters: what they look like, what they do for a living, whether they are married or single, et cetera.  Here you can decide who your characters are and what parts they are going to play.

    

Lastly, I want to discuss the outline.  When I say outline here, I do not necessarily mean the Roman numeral variety with points A, B, and C.  This is just the point at which you can decide what you want to have happen in each chapter of your book.  Begin each chapter on a new page and write down the main events and scenes you would like to include in each of those chapters.

Know, however, that nothing is set in stone. You may find that once you start writing, your story evolves into something quite different from what you had mapped out in your outline. 

 

As the old saying goes, a map is not a journey.  It’s just a starting point.