How to Write a Novel: the Complete, Proven Guide
Maybe you know how to write a short story or essay. Maybe you could do that in your sleep.
But a novel is a different beast.
Having written and published three novels myself, I'm going to break down the full process of writing a novel into seven steps.
Step #1: Know why you’re writing
The first step is to know why you're writing.
When I work with writers, I like to start by asking them: what is the big question at the heart of your book that you want to explore?
Every powerful story has a big question at the heart of it.
This is a human question.
It's deep. It's often thorny. It's difficult to answer and it's emotional. It makes us feel something. We care about it.
As an example: how do we recover from trauma?
Another: do we follow desire or responsibility to live a better life…that is, when they clash?
What question do you want to spend the next four to ten months of your life exploring? Whether it's through fiction or non-fiction, this exercise applies to both.
My big question for When You Read This, my first novel, was this: how do we derive meaning out of an unlived life when we're at the end of it? How do we look back and find meaning when we didn't do what we wanted to do?
That was a really scary question to me, and it was something I wanted to explore through fiction.
Pick your big question. It doesn't have to be scary to you, but it does have to be interesting and you have to care about it.
Step #2: Ask: “does my novel idea tee up the Big Question?
Step two is to ask: “does my novel idea tee up this big question?” Your plot line, your book’s premise, and your characters should set up your big question.
Again, my big question at the heart of my first novel, When You Read This, was: how do we make meaning out of an unlived life when we're at the end of it?
So here was my premise: my main character, when the novel opens, has just gotten a terminal diagnosis at the age of 33. She's very young. She learns that she has six months to live, and she hasn't done the things that she wanted to do with her life.
She wanted to start a bakery but hasn't started a bakery yet. She had big plans for that. She wanted to have a family but doesn't have a family yet.
So she's facing this crisis of realizing that this whole time she thought her life hadn't started yet…and it turns out that was her life. How is she going to make sense of that?
Notice that I didn't tell you the whole plot of the novel. I didn't know the whole plot of the novel yet— but I had the premise, and the premise teed up my big question.
Find a premise, a character in a particular situation that is going to tee up the question that you care about and that you want to explore.
(If it's non-fiction you're writing, that would be you in your past. What happened to you that teed up this question for you?)
Step #3: Choose a novel you love as a spirit guide
The third step is to choose a novel that you love as a spirit guide.
This novel that you love is going to be your touchstone book—the book that you'll come back to whenever you feel stumped on craft questions, like: how to structure your opening, how long a chapter should be, what should be included in a scene, or how to integrate backstory.
These are all craft challenges we face when we're writing a novel, and having a book as a kind of spirit guide—because you admire something about it and want to emulate that in your own writing—is really helpful.
You obviously don't have to copy this book's structure, and you probably wouldn't be able to do that even if you wanted to…but you can try!
Stealing structure is not a plagiarism risk! It's not a problem, either. There's nothing unethical about it.
You're just taking what works for this other person and applying it to your work, using it as inspiration.
When I was writing my first novel, When You Read This, I used the novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette as my kind of spirit guide book. I knew that I wanted to tell the story When You Read This through email, and I knew that Maria Semple had done that in Bernadette.
So I basically charted out what she did in the first 20 to 30 pages of the book: this email is here and it does this, that email is there and it does that. In this way, I could see what it looked like to effectively tell a story through email.
I didn't chart the whole book, but I did it for maybe the first fourth.
Doing so gave me some ideas for how to tell my own story through email—I got a sense of her pacing, and that was super helpful in pacing my own story.
Step #4: Decide who we are going to follow and then give them a want
Step four is to decide: who are we going to follow in your story?
By “who are we going to follow,” I mean: who is your protagonist?
Every story has a protagonist, the main person we care about, whose journey we are following.
That person is typically the person we meet in the opening of your story. There are exceptions, but 99% of the time that's the case.
You need to give your protagonist a want.
And not just any want—you want to give this character an unsatisfied want at the beginning of your story, a want that cannot be easily filled.
It doesn't have to be a want that's profound and deep and is going to take them the full novel to find. It doesn't have to be the love of a father who left when they were a child. I mean, it could be, but it doesn't have to be something that heavy.
It could be a glass of water…it could be something small, but it needs to be hard to get. It can't be a glass of water if all they need to do is stand up and walk across the room to get it.
But it could be a glass of water if they are stuck on the highway in traffic, and they've been in this gridlock and unmoving for 45 minutes, and the AC has gone out, and they are just so parched.
Or if someone has a broken leg and their crutches are across the room—a glass of water could work then.
This want does not have to carry through your draft. They can get it—their want—by chapter two, or page 10, or even page 3!
The idea is that giving a character an unsatisfied want at the opening of your story is a great hook to engage the reader and to get them invested in the story before they've had a chance to know your character enough to care about them.
Once the reader knows the character enough to care about them, this want becomes less important. But at the beginning, it's just a really useful tool.
Step #5: Start writing & follow the tension
The fifth step is to start writing and follow the tension.
You have your big question. You have your premise. You have your character with their unsatisfied want, and you have your favorite book as your spirit guide.
Now it's time to start writing.
And as you write, you are going to follow the tension. You're going to create tension, and you're going to follow it with your big question as your guide.
If you're trying to decide, oh, what should happen next? I could go this direction or that direction. I could write this scene or that scene…
Ask yourself, which of these choices enhances the tension? That's probably the direction you want to go.
When I'm writing a story, I let this question carry me at least halfway through my draft.
At some point, maybe about halfway through, I may stop and create an outline for the second half of my book. But until then I don't need one, and I don't use one.
I find outlines a little bit too confining, so I will follow the tension up until about that halfway point.
Step #6: Make a plan to finish
Step six is to make a plan to finish.
Thus far we've been talking more about craft, but this is a process step, and it's an important one.
You want to make a plan to finish so that you actually finish.
When we set concrete goals, we're much more likely to reach them than when we set vague, amorphous goals.
When do you write? For how long? How many words?
Do some research into your own process. Observe how you work so that you can project when you can be finished and then set a realistic goal date for yourself.
If you only write on Tuesdays and Thursdays for two hours each day, because that's what you have, great! That's four hours a week—four hours a week is fantastic. About how much do you write on those days? Figure out what that is. Maybe it's 3000 words a week.
If a novel is 70,000 words—which is a good target for the typical novel—figure out how many weeks it will take you to get there and set your goal date.
70,000 = 3,000 words/wk x 23 weeks
Pick a goal date 23 weeks away. And don’t just say “mid-October.” Pick an actual date: I will be done by October 15th.
Whether your goal date is two months away or eight months away, it doesn't matter. We all are going to write at different paces based on many variables.
The key is to set a concrete goal for yourself based on your schedule and lifestyle.
Step #7: Let your characters suffer and surprise you
Finally, as your last step, I want you to let your characters suffer and surprise you.
This sounds mean, but it's not. The best endings I have written are when my characters write them. They decide how they want the book to end.
But to get there, for the characters to be able to write the ending, they have to learn something, and to learn something, they have to suffer.
It can be hard as a writer to let your characters suffer, because you're probably a nice person, just like I am. And as compassionate humans, we don't like to watch people suffer. We actually like to help them escape suffering!
But when you're writing fiction, you have to allow them to suffer. It's sort of like being a parent, which you can imagine even if you're not one: when it comes to your kids, there are things they need to learn for themselves, and if you don't let them struggle, they won't learn.
The same is true for your characters.
So in the previous step, I talked about creating tension—you're creating tension, and you're letting your characters sit in that, and you're letting them experience it, and you're letting them struggle through it.
Then your ending will often write itself, because your characters will have learned something, and they will tell you what that is.
And those are the seven steps to writing a novel!
Ready to write your book?
Every published author has a first draft of their first book. We all start at the same beginning.
Were these steps helpful to you? I hope so! If you're ready to write your book and you want to know more, as a three time published novelist and writing coach I've put together a free training for how to write your dream book while holding down a full-time job or whatever you do.
In the training I teach you the exact process I use to write my books, and all you have to do to get this free training is apply, and be accepted, to my 12 month program, the Book Incubator. The application is just two questions. You can do it in under five minutes.
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You have nothing to lose except maybe years of your life dreaming of writing this book that's burning inside you. So click below to apply and, if accepted, you'll get my free training that you can watch right away. It'll totally be worth your time.
