Stages of Writing a Novel

Notes

For me, the first stage of writing a novel is the notes. This is where I accumulate every possible idea for what could be in the book. It’s important not to limit yourself, to tell yourself you can only write down “good” ideas. First, you must get through quite a lot of “bad” ideas before you get to the “good” ones.

And second – the reason I keep using quotation marks – is that ideas are only good or bad in context. If you’re writing a grimdark war novel filled with violence and nihilism, a romantic subplot filled with all the loving and tender dialogue you spent hours drafting might be a “bad” idea. But that doesn’t mean your work is wasted. When you get to the point of carving out ideas that don’t fit in the book, you don’t need to delete them – you can put them in a separate file to maybe use later. More on that in a minute.

I keep my notes organized by categories. For example:

Themes: the overarching feel or message of the book.

Plots: I want to write a fantasy lesbian werewolf heist/road trip love story inspired by Thelma & Louise:

• Thelma is struggling with being a werewolf and whether she should tell Louise.
• Louise is running from a violent ex, who is pursuing her across the countryside.
• They’re committing crimes along the way.
• The ruling priesthood is searching for them to bring them to justice.
• They’re falling in love with each other and grappling with what that means.

Each of these is a plot point and should have its own subheading under “Plots” where I can organize my ideas about each one. For example, if I have a scene worked out in my mind of Thelma and Louise stealing a set of valuable fluorescent rocks from a geology museum, that can go under Plots > Heists. If I’ve brainstormed some heartfelt, passionate declarations of undying love, that can go under Plots > Love.

Keeping organized this way helps me ensure I’m hitting all the right story beats for each plot.

Characters: all the ideas for characters who are or might be in the book, with separate subheadings for (at least) the most important ones. Thelma, Louise, Louise’s ex, the leader of the priests who are searching for the ladies – these all deserve their own subheadings.

Settings: where all the action takes place. If they’re going to rob a geology museum, I must decide: do I want to just say that? Or do I want to show it? If the latter, I need to have at least a vague idea of what the place looks like and how they would go about breaking in and out with the goods. What features can I describe that will lend verisimilitude and interest to the scene? Are there guardians, traps, alarms, or cameras? Are there ways I can use the action in the heist sequence to advance other plots – for example, an image captured by a camera gives Thelma’s ex the clue he needs to refine his search, or Louise displays some skill that catches Thelma’s eye and makes her fall just a little bit more in love.

Props: oops, it turns out those rocks are more than just fluorescent, they’re also magical and they’re having a weird effect on Thelma’s lycanthropy (that’s a new plot point, btw). If you decide to keep this plot point, you probably need to know more about the rocks beyond just “they’re shiny and magic.” Any ideas you have about the rocks go here.

And so on…. The better organized your notes are, the easier the next step becomes.

Decisions

When I reach a critical mass of notes, I can start making some decisions about what stays and what goes. This may evoke the famous “kill your darlings” advice that is given to writers, but it doesn’t need to be so permanent or so traumatic. Because an idea doesn’t fit in this book doesn’t mean you delete it and it’s gone forever. I keep separate documents for all my ideas that either don’t have a home yet or didn’t make the cut somewhere else. Just like my other writing notes, I keep them organized by storytelling elements: Ideas for Plots, Ideas for Settings, Ideas for Characters, and so on.

An idea that doesn’t feel right today might later prove to be just the inspiration you needed for the sequel you never knew you were going to write. It may find a home in another project. Or it may become the seed of an entirely new project someday. Remember, too, that characters, nations, religions, and worlds are always evolving. An idea that isn’t right for this character at this time may work for that same character at another point in their life, when their circumstances and worldview are different. There may be a prologue or a spinoff project in this.

And finally, if you don’t delete the ideas that didn’t fit, you can rescue them later if you change your mind – and you might! So, proceed with this step fearlessly, confident in the knowledge that like a good sculptor, you are chiseling away what is unnecessary to reveal the essential beauty within.

Start with your theme and be specific. If you’re writing a grimdark war novel, a theme like “anger” may be too vague to guide the process of pruning your notes. Instead, try to put your mind into a specific worldview: humans are irredeemably evil, even when they try to accomplish good. The world is broken and all you can do is fight to survive it. No matter how little I have, someone else will always try to take it from me. I must never let my guard down.

With this theme in mind, you can depict your characters spitefully rejecting or even sabotaging every good thing that may come their way in the service of this ruinous nihilism that has poisoned their minds. Your tale becomes a tragedy in the original sense, of characters undone not by circumstance but by the failings of their own character.

Having your theme well defined makes all subsequent steps easier. For example, if you have an idea for a romantic subplot, that may not fit well with your theme of irredeemable evil, a broken world, and guarded personalities. Your characters may be too emotionally scarred for that to work. But there may be ways to keep the idea; perhaps instead of two people falling tenderly in love and revealing themselves through stages of gradually increasing vulnerability, you have two traumatized and suspicious loners using intimacy as a tool or even as a weapon. You can still write hot and heavy love scenes if that’s what you want, but in better service to your theme.

And so on through all the categories of storytelling elements. A magical grove of glitter, fairies, and unicorns may not work as a setting in a nihilistic grimdark horror story – unless your characters purposefully despoil it in service to whatever grim errand mercilessly drives them through the plot. A magic sword that weeps in anguish every time it spills blood yet enhances its wielder’s swordsmanship might be the perfect prop in this tale, as it serves to enhance the theme of broken personalities forced to participate in a cosmic sausage grinder.

Outline

Now that you have a handle on what to keep and what to cut out into your “Ideas” documents, you can get organized. Often this starts with the plots: what order do the events occur, and where do you have gaps that require further brainstorming (or perhaps a visit to one of those “Ideas” documents)?

The outline also serves as a “to-do” list for you, keeping you on schedule with all the necessary story beats. How do you advance your separate plot lines together, so your reader (and you!) doesn’t lose track of them? It could be that you devote a chapter to each of them in succession or you regularly alternate scenes of present-day action with flashbacks to something meaningful in the past.

The more detailed your outline, the better – and the less work you’ll be creating for yourself later when you go to flesh out later drafts and realize you put something in the wrong place or completely forgot an important plot point and left it hanging in Chapter Three.

That said, the only way to write a novel is to write, and sometimes the only way to figure out what happens next is to get in there and do the work. At some point, you need to stop planning and just go do it.

First Draft

I intentionally keep my first drafts loose and sketchy. I think of it like assembling a piece of furniture out of the box: it’s better to keep the bolts loose so you can easily add or move panels around while you work. Once everything is in the right place, you can go back and tighten down all the bolts. My goal with a first draft is write everything I know about the story (thereby exposing everything I don’t – neat trick there) and test the assumptions I made in the previous stages. I may have gotten any number of things wrong there: my outline may prove to be out of order, I may have chosen the wrong things to keep or discard from my notes, and I may have changed my mind entirely about the theme. It happens.

Keeping things loose makes it easier to adjust as your ideas become clearer and your assumptions either withstand or fail the tests of actual execution. I use [square brackets] extensively to call out missing information:

• The name of a character that I just don’t have the inspiration to figure out. I can use [Jim], [Bob], and [Jim-Bob], or [Name1], [Name2], and [Name3], then use find and replace later when inspiration strikes.
• A missing piece of action: [Jim and Bob ford the river to meet Jim-Bob on the other side].
• Missing description: [a city skyline under a canopy of twinkling stars]
• Or an entire section where I don’t know what happens next: [???]

Once I’m through my first draft, I can search for those brackets in my word processor and start filling in gaps. Working this way also allows me to keep the flow going. If I feel like this is an appropriate place to describe the setting of the action but haven’t done the necessary world-building to give that description justice, I can choose to interrupt what I’m doing and go work on that instead, or I can just [insert description here] and keep moving. Either choice is valid and either choice will get you closer to a finished novel. It’s up to you to decide which better suits your working style and current mood – hit pause and trust you can pick up again later where you left off, or trust that you’ve kept the scene loose enough to add more detail in later when you’re better prepared for it.

Subsequent Drafts

It really doesn’t matter how many subsequent drafts it takes you to produce a “finished” piece. I usually do five rounds of writing and revision, yielding three or four separate drafts.

• First draft: loose sketch, test assumptions and expose gaps. At this point, I’m talking to myself more than any potential future reader.
• Between first and second drafts: if this book is part of a series, this is a good time to review the overarching plots and themes of the series and address any inconsistencies or work in anything necessary to preserve continuity. For example, if a character is going to give birth to a child in Book Two, they may need to be pregnant in Book One. Because these revisions can be consequential to the current book, I like to do them as early as possible.
• Second draft: work out logistical and logical problems. Resolve contradictions in the plot, move big sections around, merge or divide supporting characters based on their function in the story, figure out what exactly they did with their horses when they got to the city, how exactly they managed to cover 800 kilometers in three days, etc.
• Third draft: give it life. Add description and emotion. Fill out dialogue-heavy sequences with action and settings so I don’t just have a bunch of talking heads in a white room. Expand characters’ internal narratives to better humanize them.
• Fourth draft: make it pretty and make it potent. Test each sentence for maximum utility and service to the themes. Read the dialogue out loud and rework it to make it sound more natural. Remove unnecessary words like “suddenly.” Think about dialogue tags. Rewrite “telling” sequences with more “showing.” Rewrite excessively wordy passages. Vary sentence length within each paragraph. Ask, “how can I help my reader? Where am I expecting my reader to read my mind? Where am I trying to do all the work for my reader instead of trusting them to possess an imagination of their own?”
• Final revisions: ugh grammar, blah spelling, meh punctuation, yawn formatting. This is typically when I bring all the chapter drafts together and assemble them into a manuscript. Now all the nitpicky little details become important. It’s tedious but important. Glaring errors in even these seemingly superficial details can shock your reader out of their immersion and remind them that they’re reading a book. Don’t break the spell.

One thing that is important to note: no one but you is going to read those early drafts. They can be as clunky, confusing, cringeworthy, and incomplete as necessary to keep you working and moving forward. Until it’s published and available for sale to the public, it isn’t finished. If you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night six months deep in a novel with the realization that your badass protagonist’s initials spell a goofy word, that’s okay. You can just change it, and no one will ever need to know.

The key to success in any project or any skill is consistent effort. Remember, the goal of finishing your novel isn’t just to finish a novel – it’s to make yourself a better writer. Practicing your craft every day – even if the result is not “good” (see Note above for a reminder why I put quotation marks around “good”) – will hone your skills and help you gradually accelerate the volume and quality of your output. Getting bogged down trying to make your first chapter perfect is only going to be discouraging. If you approach writing as a process with defined stages that build on each other toward an inevitable outcome, you will be better equipped to trust the process, trust yourself, and just keep working. The answers will come … but only if you have the courage to ask the questions.