Writing Tip – Planning your Novel

All good writing needs a good plan. Good writing is an exercise in higher thinking, and takes time, review, and revision. Just like a contractor wouldn’t dream of building a house without plan, you shouldn’t consider writing for pay without a detailed plan either. Who would buy a house that wasn’t put together properly? Likewise, writing that is poorly done is just as likely to go unsold.

There are several techniques that you can apply to the writing process that will help you build the structure, and detail you need to produce the best writing that you have to offer your readers. I will outline a few of them for you below.

Outlines

There are a lot of opinions on what you should do first when it comes to organizing your writing. My opinion is that it really depends on how organized your thoughts are. If you have formulated some of your story in your head, then I believe you should start an outline as soon as you can. If you haven’t got any idea what you are writing about, then you need to go through a brainstorming phase to get ideas before you can actually start to organize those ideas. Let’s assume you have an idea of what you will be writing about.

An outline is a document that logs your ideas in either sequential, or hierarchical order. If you have never written an outline, you really should try it. Outlines can help you see the structure of your thoughts at a high level, and can help you identify large gaps in your thinking. Outlines are alive, and you should anticipate that your outline will evolve as your writing progresses.

Common uses of outlines include: plots, lists where relationships are important, family hierarchy, scenes, scenarios, and events etc.

Mind Mapping

Similar to brainstorming, Mind Mapping engages your creative side by drawing out relationships to words and phrases that you write down. Once you have written down a word or concept that is important to your writing, you then branch off from that word to consider different aspects, and defenitions that relate to that word. This activity will create an idea, or thought cloud of sorts that will allow you to connect important ideas and how they relate to each other.

For example, I might write down the word “Car” in the middle of my paper, and circle it. Then I would draw a line out from it and write the word “Components” and circle it. Branching off from the word components, I could write “Plastic Components,” “Metal Components,” or “Fiberglass Components” and so forth. If I went back to the word “Car” I could draw another line and then circle the word “Style,” or yet another line connecting thet word “Color.” You get the idea. Pretty soon you have a visual map that helps you engage the creative side of your brain.

Index cards

Another great tool you can use to help you plan your novel is index cards. You can pick up several packs of 3×5 index cards for just a few dollars at your local Walmart. The great thing about index cards is that they are small, portable, and split up into separate cards.

Index cards are great for plotting, character mapping, and scene building. Let’s start with your characters. Take one of the 3×5 index cards, and write your protagonist’s name at the type. Below that you can include some physical and emotional characteristics as well. Suddenly your character starts to take some shape from a high level. Now, do this with the rest of your characters (to the extent that you can during this initial phase).

Grab a different colored set of cards now. Brainstorm a few scenes and write them out on these different colored index cards. Shuffle them around, and experiment with a different order of operations. What would happen if scene B happened before scene A? What would that do to the flow of the story? What would that do to the characters?

Finally you take yet another set of colored index cards, and you write some plot points on them. Now that you have several colored sets of index cards with important information, you can physically lay them out on the floor, or on the wall, or whatever space you have to create a flow, or a timeline of people, and events. This is very powerful as you can now start experimenting very quickly by moving the cards around. This will almost assuredly get your mind firing ver all the possibilities!

Thanks for reading!

Justin

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