THE THREE BASIC STEPS OF NOVEL WRITING

All good stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. This division applies equally well to the process of writing a novel. There are three basic steps: things you do to prepare before you actually write the novel (the beginning of the process); the act of writing the novel (the middle or heart of the process); and, finally, the things you do after having written the novel (the end of the process).

Basically, the first step is about exploring your idea, evaluating it to determine whether it's worth investing a lot of time and effort in to write, and planning your story in detail. This is important to avoid false starts and to give you every opportunity for success while you actually write the story.

The second step involves writing a complete draft from beginning to end. If you do a good job with it (because of all that planning!), then you can go on to edit it. If it is very rough, then it serves as a first draft (which you wrote in place of doing all that planning!) and you will have to go back to the beginning and write it again, from beginning to end. You need to produce a complete draft that is reasonably close to what you intended, whether it's the first draft or the fifth. Planning well before you write can help you get there that much sooner and save you a lot of wasted time and effort.

The third step is to edit your completed draft. This process involves creating more notes, but they will help you make sure everything is in order. Once you have a lengthy manuscript in front of you, you realize how daunting it is to go back into it and start changing things. Notes help serve as your guide posts, or route markers, a way of keeping track of what's there, a way to see all that material in a short and concise way. Editing involves both larger-scale editing of the story, where you add or drop chapters or significantly alter scenes, and smaller-scale editing where you touch up the actual words and improve the clarity, conciseness and impact of your writing. Finally, this step involves sharing your work with readers who will give you feedback, making any additional changes, and trying to sell your completed manuscript to publishers.

The next three postings will look at each of these steps in more detail. Then, subsequent postings will provide specific tips and tricks, the nuts and bolts. I hope to be able to put my tables and charts online for free download, if I can figure out how to do that, as they may be of use to others.