Guest blog - How To Write A Novel In Three Months by Seraphina Nova Glass
As part of the Someone's Listening Blog Tour today I'm lucky to have a fascinating guest blog from the author Seraphina Nova Glass (a first time for the blog) which looks at a particular approach to writing.
They say writing is re-writing, but I have to disagree. I signed a multi-book deal with Harper Collins with a first draft written in ten weeks. And, I sold them a second book, and optioned a third to them the same day as a first time author. I’m not special or different than any other aspiring novelist, but I did force myself to stick to a system and it’s the same method I teach in my writing courses at the university where I teach. Before I wrote my first book I remembered an article I read where Steven King was quoted saying “The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season.” I liked this. I decided that I would follow this rule, and never take more than three months to write a draft and I have stuck to that.
Your idea needs structure, so first outline!
Most people hate this. It takes up too much time. It’s boring. It stifles creativity, all of that.
Well, if you don’t create this roadmap for your book, you’re wasting your time, and increasing the chances that your first draft will suck, and that you’ll be spending tons of time re-writing.
Don’t be afraid of structure. An outline does not kill creative freedom, it breathes life into creative freedom. As readers, we crave structure, believe it or not. More importantly, as writers, we need it.
When I begin, it’s quite simplistic:
I estimate a page count
I assume the book will be around 300 pages (just as a starting place.)
I estimate ten pages per chapter
This gives bite sized pieces so it’s less daunting. Now I’m only dealing with ten pages at a time.
I simply write the numbers 1-30 down a blank Word doc
Then, I start to fill in the main ideas for each of the 30 chapters. (seems like a child would think of this!) Yeah, I mean it’s not sophisticated, but keeping it simple works for me because plotting a mystery is complex enough and I need an easy was to keep track of all the twists and turns.
Write three and a half pages a day
That’s all it takes to get your 300 pages-ish done in three months.
Write in the parts you know
What’s the big dramatic problem in the story and how will it be resolved? Start there. What are the most important things that happen in between the beginning and end? You’re guessing at what chapter to add them to right now, but that’s okay, the outline will shift as you develop it. You know what your story is about, right? So then you should be able to see this take shape. Hopefully it’s exciting, but...
Don’t be surprised when you realize that you may not have enough there for a novel!
I almost cry when I look at how sparse it starts out sometimes when I thought my idea was more developed. That’s okay, that’s what this process if for. You’ll get there, but stick with it. When lost I always ask myself: what is my protagonists Intention and Obstacle? (Her main goal needs to be strong with high stakes, her obstacles formidable.) This helps guide me.
Take your time
I spend a few weeks thinking about my story and coming back to the outline--during dog walks, workouts, just staring at the wall trying to birth a breakthrough about the story. Once I see it laid out, my mind is constantly thinking about what events and characters and surprises will fill in these chapters and in what order. This is how you’ll spend the next days, weeks maybe.
Each chapter should end with a hook
When you look at each ten pages or so as its own story with a beginning, middle, and end, you’ll start to realize that no pages can be wasted. Every word should move your story ahead. Make sure there is a “so what?” for each chapter. Ask yourself: Why is this scene important? How does it serve the story? Is there way to end this chapter that makes the reader want to turn the page?
When you look at that fairly blank pages with thirty chapters waiting to be filled in, it may be daunting, but it is NOTHING compared to staring at a blank page with hundreds of pages ahead of you and you are just “pantsing” or figuring it out as you go with no plan.
You don’t need to write whole paragraphs in this outline. You want to try to fill in the main events that need to happen in each chapter to keep the story moving along. That’s all. I have anywhere from 5-20 bullet points for each chapter usually. If you have one, cool. It’s a great start if you can find one main event for each chapter.
You are not cutting off creative freedom this way. You have NOT planned out every last detail of the book to a suffocating level. You have given yourself a necessary road map.
If you have twenty chapters in the outline that you can’t fill in--where you don’t know what will happen and are struggling to develop the plot or characters enough to find even one or two main events for that chapter--that should tell you something. Maybe the story doesn’t have legs yet.
When I sit down to write, I’m don’t feel lost or stressed. If I’m on chapter six that day, well, I look to my outline, and I have my notes telling me what needs to happen in that chapter. No guessing. I can look forward to it because I am on the fun part now, I get to explore the world of the story and the characters with more confidence.
A smarter person than me could probably wing it, but for me I can’t imagine how you can you write a draft (without planning) and not write meandering, pointless, off-track chunks of pages if you don’t know what will happen--what you are writing TO? If I don’t know that my character will find the burner phone in her cheating husband’s car, for example, in chapter twenty, well then I probably didn’t set up the burner phone in, say, chapter six...because I had no plan, and I wasted time. Now I have to go back and set up this part of the story...and probably many more poorly-planned parts of the story... because I didn’t take the time to make a solid story arc and outline before I started.
In my experience, the finished book comes out pretty darn close to how I envisioned it. I sold my books as first drafts because of careful planning. You do not have to spend months or years revising if you have a solid structure before you start. You will identify plot holes and gaps and fix problems before they occur.
