There might be no better test of endurance than writing a novel.
You face the hurdles of procrastination, fatigue, self doubt, and all your earthly responsibilities. You feel the temptation of easier, fresher ideas while slogging through the middle of your manuscript.
If you’ve found yourself here, you may have tried your hand at writing a novel already and found yourself defeated by one (or all) of these obstacles. Luckily, there are ways to make it easier.
In this article, I’ll discuss how to plan a novel with advice on outlining your story and scheduling time to write. Lastly, I’ll give you a Story Weapon to clearly show what it means to actually cross the finish line.
Learn how to plan a novel: transition from a messy first draft to a polished story by performing a narrative inventory and creating a fresh outline for your rewrite. By prioritizing the “most effective way” to tell your story over your initial notes, you maintain creative authority while refining your manuscript into its best version.
How to begin
The first step to planning out your story is, surprisingly, not planning anything at all. Seriously.
You may already have an idea of where things could go or a few plot points that excite you. Before you commit to those, however, you need to give your subconscious mind time to roam the world you’re creating.
Creating a novel involves marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure.
The first stage is about nourishing your wild, creative instinct. You’re chasing the feeling of aliveness that brought the story to your mind in the first place. It’s a bit like spending the time to fuel up your car and pack snacks before you start driving toward the last page of the manuscript. The more gas you have, the less likely you are to stall out on page ninety-eight.
The process of inquiry
Nourish the creative instinct by embracing curiosity. Ask a lot of questions and give yourself time to answer them. Even when you’re not at your desk, your mind is still turning over the intricacies of your story.
Ask about your characters and what makes them who they are. Inquire into the world of your story and explore your characters’ primal drives. Here’s some stream-of-consciousness writing prompts that I give my students in my 90-Day Novel classes.
After you’ve spent some time imagining the world of your story, you can begin to explore an outline. I dive deeper into that topic here but let’s go over the basics.
With your premise in mind and the dilemma besetting your protagonist, you can then begin the process of allowing your characters to suggest plot by exploring the structure questions. From that point, you should have some notes about your beginning, middle, and end. Just a rough map will do. There’s plenty to discover along the way.
“The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”
– Agatha Christie
Stick to a schedule
Now that you have an idea of how your story will unfold, you can turn that outline into a schedule for yourself.
In the world of marathon running, this is similar to setting a pace. An amateur runner might show up on race day with a good attitude and new shoes. A more seasoned runner (like you) has a plan for how they’ll spread out their energy across all twenty-six miles. They have a sense for which sections are easiest for them and which are hardest. They know to avoid the trap of sprinting too fast right out of the gate.
Give yourself soft deadlines for each section of the story. The middle act or acts will probably be your meatiest portions, with the first and last acts being shorter.
When you’re creating this schedule, make sure it fits into your life. Writing should become a sustainable part of your world, not another stressor. Deadlines are more like guesses on how long it’ll take. If you find that you’re beating a deadline by a week or missing it by the same gap, you’ll be better at setting deadlines the next time around.
With this schedule in mind, all that’s left is to march toward the rough draft.
Don’t look back as you write and correct mistakes. There’s no need to edit or luxuriate with a thesaurus to search for the perfect word. It’s just about making it to that finish line. Make notes along the way of things you’d like to change and other routes you noticed.
Your story weapon: Crossing the finish line
If you’ve followed these steps, you can expect to finish a messy, but real first draft fairly quickly. In my 90-Day Novel workshop, there is a high success rate of completing the first draft in three months. As I tell my students, “What was impossible to accomplish in ten years becomes possible in 90 days because you’re accessing a different part of your brain.”
When you set a goal of 90 days, you’re giving yourself enough time to get all of the words down, but not enough time to concern yourself with the quality of the prose in the first draft. When your subconscious recognizes the impossibility of writing a polished draft, it surrenders all notions of perfectionism and simply focuses on telling the story. Editing and refining the prose will happen in the next draft!
Once you have completed your first draft it is important to take a minute to rest and celebrate! Through a combination of will and a good plan, you’ll have done what you thought was impossible. The first draft is a great checkpoint, but there’s more work to do. The good news is that the hardest part is over. You are no longer staring at a blank page (or screen).
Once you have a first draft and you’ve popped the champagne, it is time to begin the rewrite. Here’s two questions to ask yourself before you begin.
- Have I said everything I set out to say?
This involves doing an inventory. It is a way of getting all of your ideas and images and fragments of dialogue onto the page so that your subconscious can heave a sigh of relief that nothing will be left unsaid. And then . . .
- Have I said it in the most effective way?
This stage involves doing a new outline. Yes, that’s right! In fact, you want to do this outline as if you did not write your first draft. In other words, now that you know your story so much better, you want to ask yourself: What is the most dynamic and compelling way to tell this story?
This allows you the freedom to imagine conflating characters or moving scenes around. It allows you the space to take a macro approach to the narrative before getting granular with the prose. This is where you can make a list of sections that need to be rewritten, discarded, or created anew. You can turn this list into another schedule, with clear deadlines and a plan to make it to a second draft. This should be easier than the last go around.
The next steps are up to you. Once you have completed a second pass through the manuscript, you may want to hand the draft over to a writing friend for a review or let the manuscript rest for some time.
The important thing to remember in giving your work to others for review, is to never abdicate authority of your work. You must always stay connected to that initial impulse that got you started. I have seen too many wonderful, and messy but brilliant first drafts get neutered by incurious readers who are more interested in giving notes on how they would have written the book than inquiring into what the author was attempting to express. In short, you must trust that what you are attempting to express is valid, even if it feels, at times, somewhat ineffable.
You’re doing something difficult and, though there’s pain mixed with pleasure, there’s joy at the end of the road. Pace yourself as you plan your novel from start to finish, and enjoy the views along the way.
Tools of craft are vital to enjoying yourself on the writing journey. If you’re interested in where your instincts should take you next and how to guide them through deeper tools of craft, join one of my next workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day.
