Tomorrow was elevated to round 2: the following five are this month's runners up: thanks to everyone who took part! blame the slight delay to this month's announcement on us being held hostage by some agressive paperclips and their overly sharpened pencil cronies. You need to know what you're writing and almost as importantly you have to have enough motivation to finish. finding out your core idea and mood, reading articles on the blog, joining a group and getting feedback on your critique submissions are always free. There are costs for access to the full suite of now novel tools and support from a personal writing coach from $19/month i know, we hate signing up everywhere too.

In order to save your story we need to associate it with a specific name and email address. You've heard the saying, 147 everybody has a story to tell? 148 well, here's your chance to discover how to get your story down on the written page! kindle ebook publishing articles you're ready and willing to write a kindle book, but you're wondering what you should write about. Unlike traditional publishing, there's no need for an agent, you don't have to submit your manuscript for consideration, and you don't have to wait the months or even years it takes to have your book press printed. Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. One of my most popular lectures is this one: how to write a novel using what i call the snowflake method. this page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day, so you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. Look it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest! if it makes you puke, i wont be insulted.

Ill make the best case i can for my way of organizing things, but you are the final judge of what works best for you. Write your novel! good fiction doesnt just happen, it is designed. Ive done it both ways and i strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result. our fundamental question is this: how do you design a novel? for a number of years, i was a software architect designing large software projects. Ok, whats the snowflake metaphor? before you go further, take a look at this cool web site. Dont tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object thats been widely studied.

If you scroll down that same web page a little, youll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right arrow button repeatedly, youll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesnt look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until its done. the first few steps look like this: i claim that thats how you design a novel you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. But part of the work is just managing your creativity getting it organized into a well structured novel.

if youre like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. Im going to assume that you know how to compost your story ideas and that you have already got a novel well composted in your mind and that youre ready to sit down and start writing that novel. Why? because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. And you need to produce it using a process that doesnt kill your desire to actually write the story. step 1 take an hour and write a one sentence summary of your novel. Something like this: a rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle paul. This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.

When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. Its the hook that will sell your book to your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to bookstore owners, and ultimately to readers. So make the best one you can! some hints on what makes a good sentence: shorter is better. No character names, please! better to say a handicapped trapeze artist than jane doe. Which character has the most to lose in this story? now tell me what he or she wants to win. Read the one line blurbs on the new york times bestseller list to learn how to do this. step 2 take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel.

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Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. If you believe in the three act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of act 1. It is ok to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but i think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonists attempts to fix things.

Characters are the most important part of any novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten fold when you start writing. Go ahead! this is goodit means your characters are teaching you things about your story. Its always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages.

Any revisions you make now are revisions you wont need to make later on to a clunky 400 page manuscript. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! you can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better. step 4 by this stage, you should have a good idea of the large scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft.

Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a pretty decent one page skeleton of your novel. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals.

Human Nature In Romeo And Juliet Essay

step 5 take a day or two and write up a one page description of each major character and a half page description of the other important characters. These character synopses should tell the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters. I usually enjoy this step the most and lately, i have been putting the resulting character synopses into my proposals instead of a plot based synopsis. step 6 by now, you have a solid story and several story threads, one for each character.

Do Over Scholarship Essay

Now take a week and expand the one page plot synopsis of the novel to a four page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step 4 into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face. step 7 take another week and expand your character descriptions into full fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character.