How To Write Your Novel & Finish It 7 easy steps to writing and finishing a novel By Sue Kendrick How To Write Your Novel & Finish It is published by WriteLink 2010. Copyright remains with the author, Sue Kendrick and may not be copied or distributed without the permission of the author. http://www.suekendrick.co.uk/suesbooks
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CONTENTS Foreward CHAPTER ONE – Who are you writing for? CHAPTER TWO – The Plot CHAPTER THREE – Developing the Plot CHAPTER FOUR – Creating Characters CHAPTER FIVE – Character Portraits PART SIX – Timelines and Blurbs PART SEVEN – Chapters CHAPTER 8 – What Next?
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FOREWARD I know I’m going to come across as an expert here which would be great if I’d actually written a novel, but I haven’t! At least, not the whole of one so why do I think I’m qualified to tell anyone anything about novel writing? Well, three years ago I was asked to put on a literary event for my local Arts Festival. They wanted something the press would get excited about and which they hoped would generate some free publicity. My brain child was the Novelettathon or write a novel in a day! Ambitious or what! My local writers’ club thought I’d gone mad and so did I at times, but once the idea occurred to me, I was oblivious to any problems! It was only when the excitement died down and I was faced with turning the idea into a practical reality did the sheer magnitude of what I’d started, hit me. Necessity is the mother of invention so they say and I did get this project off the ground and very successful it turned out to be as well. A total of 14 writers worked on the book, each writing one or more chapters. These were all done during the Novelettathon day and tidied up and co-ordinated by me at a later date. The result was The Killing Tree which you can see here: THE KILLING TREE All well and good, but most authors do not want to work in a team or even have the opportunity to do so if they did. Well that’s O.K. because this isn’t about collaboration. I learnt a very valuable lesson from that Novelettathon.
I realised that detailed planning is the key to writing any book and is the one sure way of making you finish it. Now I can just hear the waves of shock horror reverberating around the ether! Planning destroys creativity … you have to let the characters tell their stories … writing is a stream of consciousness, you can’t plan it! Hmm … well if that works for you then great, but I’m willing to bet that most authors who hold to those convictions seldom get past Chapter Three at the most! As for those that do limp along to the end, if Writelink’s Novel Beginnings first chapter contest is anything to go by, their plots are likely to have more holes than a tramp’s sock and their characters would make great props for motorway bridges!
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In my opinion, creativity is like a fire, let it burn as it will and it destroys, control and harness its force and you have a very powerful tool of heat and passion to do your bidding!
I discovered the huge advantages of planning through necessity which is why most aspiring authors don’t do it and consequently suffer burn out. This is understandable really as most of us do not have deadlines for our books, noone really cares whether we write them, we may even face hostility from our families who can’t see the point of it, so we just muddle along hoping that one day we will actually hit the keyboard or get past the chapter three block! It doesn’t have to be like this! The chapters in this ebook will ensure you are not one of the millions with an unfinished novel gathering dust in a forgotten drawer, but one of the few ready to take on the publishing world.
I’m not going to wish you luck as that doesn’t come into it! What counts is graft and perseverance!
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CHAPTER ONE – Who are you writing for? Anyone can write a book and anyone does which is why there are so many unpublished books languishing in the slush pile. If you want your book to be hauled out of the mire, you need to do some very serious thinking even before you tap out a single word. Who exactly are you writing for?
It should NOT BE YOURSELF which is what an awful lot of would be novelists end up doing! Think about your ideas and then ask yourself who is likely to be interested in them. If you are all ready part way into your novel you can still do this, in fact you must do it as it will direct your writing and this alone will give you the motivation to finish what you have started. Write for ONE reader, not the millions you may be hoping for! Have a clear idea of who this reader is and understand that your aim is to keep this reader totally engaged. When the Killing Tree (the novel I co-wrote for our Arts Festival workshop) was planned out, the two of us that would be leading the workshop sat down and made some important decisions about our prospective readers. We knew that the average age of our workshop members would be between 30 and 60 probably more women than men, reasonably well educated with a strong interest in what was happening around them, especially local history and the paranormal! These were the sort of people we were going to write for. Now obviously you will not be running a workshop so won’t have this advantage, but you can still define your reader by asking yourself who amongst your acquaintances would enjoy the type of novel you want to write. It’s not difficult to do, make a list of the readers amongst your family and friends and ask them which books they have read in the past year and which they enjoyed the most. You could even to do a little survey which should include gathering details of their interests. You can do this either online or off or both which is even better! A good place to run a survey is to create a Squidoo lens. This is very easy to do and won’t cost you anything. If you haven’t used Squidoo before run a search on Google for how to build a Squidoo lens. You will be offered hundreds of very simple tutorials.
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You should come up with someone who would find the subject matter of your book to their taste. Actually, if you have some vague idea of writing a novel, but no idea of what to write, this is a great method of finding a market! Once you have identified your target, always keep them in mind during the plotting and writing process! I actually stuck a photograph of my parent’s neighbour on my PC when I wrote my share of the Killing Tree! Mrs B loved who-dun-its and was an active “friend” of the local museum! Once this step is out of the way you can get down to some serious plotting, but don’t rush it! The more research you do into your potential readership the better your chance of writing and finishing a PUBLISHABLE novel.
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CHAPTER TWO – The Plot Since you now know who you are writing for you should know what kind of book you need to write to keep your reader turning the pages. For instance, knowing Mrs B’s passion for Whodunits and her additional interest in local history, I would not expect her to be particularly thrilled with a book about a lesbian’s coming out right-ofpassage angst novel! Well, perhaps I would if said lesbian happened to the victim of an anti-gay serial killer engaged in historical research into sexual perversion at the local monastery! Oh my goodness! Can you see what I have just done? I’ve come up with a one sentence plot without really meaning too!
This is what you must do … the only difference being you must make a conscious decision to do it and not leave it to chance! You can do this by jotting down a few keywords about your reader so back to Mrs B for an example! Age 63 Widow Former primary school teacher 3 children, one nearby, two live away health – reasonable, but quite short sighted. interests, reading, especially whodunits (fiction), biographies and local history (nonfiction). Gardening, crafts, especially candle making. Social life – Friends of Museum. (Monthly meeting and other events). Weekly social club for retired persons Spiritualist church With Mrs B very much at the fore front of our minds, our one sentence plot which defined our book, was …
This book is about a brutal, ritualistic murder whose body parts turn up at various, local historical, tourist attractions! Not too difficult is it? Your sentence doesn’t need to be a literary work of art. As long as it its brief and to the point is all that matters. Something else to remember, writing a one sentence plot like this, far from stifling creativity, actually has the
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opposite affect of fanning the flames of your thought processes, but in a much more controlled and effective manner. I would be willing to bet that your mind is all ready feverishly developing that minimalist plot! Before we move on to how we do this, I know some of you will be thinking this is all very well, but my book is about or is going to be about the trials and traumas of my characters. There are no murders or mysteries to solve. No rags to riches journey to chronicle, just a bunch of ordinary people trying to cope with an extra ordinary situation. This is very much the case with the book I am reading at the moment. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult is strongly character driven and revolves around the lives of a teenage girl battling with terminal leukaemia. The story is told from the different view points of everyone touching her life at this very critical time. At first glance, there does not seem to be much of a plot. Look closer though and you will see that a plot of sorts does exist. All the characters touching the unfortunate teenager’s life have issues to cope with as a result of having to live their lives around the ever present threat of the death of a loved one. All react in different ways, some more dramatically than others and the central character has a very tough decision to make the outcome of which we are kept guessing until the end. These issues mesh together to create a plot that keeps the story on track, drives it forward and piques the interest of the reader. I don’t want to say any more on this as it will spoil the book for you if you haven’t read it. If this is the kind of book you are writing though, I would heartily recommend you do read it! Okay, your tasks today are to find a real live person who epitomises a typical reader of your book. If possible find a photograph of him/her and stick it where you can easily see it. Get it into your head that hence forth you are writing for this one person!
Secondly, write a short sentence that aptly sums up what your book is about. Again it is a good idea to print this out in large letters and keep it where it is easily viewable.
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READ MORE! I hope you’ve enjoyed what you have read so far and found it useful. If you would like to read the rest of HOW TO WRITE YOUR NOVEL & FINISH IT you can download the full version by clicking the PayPal link below the graphic COST: £5.00 (about $7.49)
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