chapter

Introduction

Every writer is different, as is every story, and this makes constructing a universal guide to writing a novel a difficult task. Each writer, including you, will have their own approach to writing their novel, based on their personal preferences. There are very few firm rules that must be followed, or at least no rules that can’t be broken or bent (often to good effect). With this in mind this guide doesn’t attempt to tell you how to write your novel in a prescriptive way. Instead it offers you practical, step-by-step assistance with the task in front of you and encourages you to explore the infinite number of options that are available to you. It will hold your hand, in other words, but allow you to make the important decisions for yourself – based on the needs of your novel and your own ambition.

To this end, this guide describes the central aspects of novel writing. Each chapter starts with a general overview of the area of focus followed by specific routes to explore and questions to ask yourself to identify your objectives and develop your approach. Hopefully, as a result, this guide provides a frame on which to assemble the various elements of your novel, as well as suggesting ways in which the story can be written.

In each chapter, I also give examples that illustrate the matter being discussed. I have used hypothetical novels of my own devising for this, rather than the more common method of referring to published novels. This approach has the advantage of flexibility; a hypothetical novel can be altered to explain multiple approaches to novel-writing tasks, while also demonstrating how decision making has a logical momentum of its own that can produce a more rounded story.

One of the primary aims of this guide is to encourage you to interrogate the creative decisions you make while working, and to challange the story that you want to tell. This means that the guide includes a lot of general questions, which you should be able to easily apply to your work in progress. The more questions you ask yourself, the