A cunning plan
In this post we are going to talk about the preliminary planning for your novel. When I wrote my first, second and third book I didn’t plan at all. I sat down and wrote those books from start to finish. I finished these books, but the revision process was long and involved, and it took twice as long to write them as it does for me now. With planning in the way I’m about to show you, I can get a first draft written in about one and a half months. Where as before it took me a minimum of three months and sometimes longer to write a book with no planning.
The first thing I do to come up with my novel plan is make a list, in bullet point form, of the main things that happen in the book. This is usually not a long list. The idea is to come up with the big events that occur in the novel, usually the ones that revolve around your main plot. You may have sub-plots in your book as well, but it isn’t necessary to plan these at this point. What you want to do is figure out the main story line that is going to carry through the entire book. It has to be something that can’t be solved easily. You start with an inciting incident, which will be at the beginning of the book, and start the major plot. Then you will have several occurences that have to do with this plot which raise the stakes for your characters. You will have a crisis point at the climax of your story, and finally a resolution at the end of the book.
Also when I’m at this stage I determine a projected length for the book. Usually when I start a book I either have a specific publisher in mind to submit to, or I use a standard word count that is acceptable to publishers for the genre I write in. Once I know the word length, I determine how many chapters I want to write, and how many scenes per chapter. I then determine the projected word length per scene in the book. Here is an example of how this works.
For our example, we are going to write a book that is 75,000 words in length. We decide that we want to have fifteen chapters in this book, with three scenes per chapter. So in total we know that we need to write 45 scenes (15×3). To determine the projected length of each scene we simply divide the total projected word count by the number of scenes, which works out approximately to 1,666 words per scene. If you want to determine how many pages this works out to be simply divide the number of words per scene by 250, which is the average number of words on a page. It works out to be roughly 6.5 pages. We need to know how many scenes will be in our book in order to come up with a scene plan. We’ll discuss the scene plan in the next post.
Your homework assignment for today is to determine what your main plot is. You will need to make a list which includes your inciting incident, several plot points which will raise the tension, a climax and a resolution. You will also need to determine how long you want your book to be and how many chapters and scenes are going to be in the book.
Up next – brainstorming and coming up with a chapter plan
See you soon and happy writing.
