You want to write a novel and get it published, but where do you start?
1. The Idea
Every great book (and every not-so-great-book) started the same way, with an idea. Maybe an author was at McDonalds and began daydreaming about a kid that climbed through the Playland slides into a cartoon fantasyland and had an adventure to get back home. Maybe an author looked out his front window and a stray cat inspired a story of a society of super-genius cats who daily save the world. Maybe an author witnessed a young couple fight and was inspired to write the story of how their relationship started and how they got to that horrible moment.
Inspiration is everywhere. In fact, I never leave home without at least a pen and paper, because I never know when something may cross my mind that I don’t want to forget.
What makes an idea good or bad?
Stephen King said in his book, On Writing, that the best ideas combine two elements that don’t belong together in an attempt to create something that hasn’t been done. For example:
•Good vampires: Four New York Times bestsellers in the Twilight series.
•Teenage Superman: Smallville has made a fortune paring the perfect Superman with an imperfect teenager. (No offense, you teenagers, but I hope you can see how this makes it a great idea.)
•Lawyers in trouble: John Grisham has made millions with this idea. Most lawyers lead a pretty dull life of paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork, but not in Grisham’s books.
•A child wizard: Most wizards are old and wise, but in Harry Potter, a child gets to learn to be one.
•Kid spies: This idea spawned Spy Kids, Agent Cody Banks, Alex Rider, Cherub: A division of MI6, and my Mission League series.
So, your first step in planning a novel is to come up with that great idea. Let’s face it, pretty much everything has been done, but that doesn’t stop writers from writing or readers from wanting more books. Your idea needs to be something with a unique twist that will make your story stand out from the rest and keep readers turning the pages.
Let’s do this thing!
First, write a one sentence description of your idea, trying to put as much as possible into less than twenty words. For example:
•A teenage spy begins training and must prevent a mysterious woman from exposing his secret counter-cult organization. (17 words- The New Recruit)
•A girl moves to a tiny northwest town and falls in love with a vampire who doesn’t kill people. (19 words- Twilight)
•A criminal mastermind teen boy discovers an underground fairy world and plots to rob them of their gold. (18 words- Artemis Fowl)
•A boy discovers his ability to talk to people in pictures and is sent to a special boarding school. (19 words- Midnight for Charlie Bone)
•Five winged teenagers are being chased by the evil doctors who want to experiment on them. (16- Maximum Ride)
•Four friends are connected by a magic pair of pants when they are forced to spend the summer apart. (19- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)
Next, write that idea into a tag line, just like the ones they use in the movies. This will help you with the overall theme of your story and with a pitch to an editor or agent when you get the chance.
Examples:
•Save the world. Get the girl. Pass math. (Agent Cody Banks)
•Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can’t be without. (Pride and Prejudice)
•As Darkness Falls, The Last Dragon Will Choose Its Rider. (Eragon)
•She didn’t belong. She was misunderstood. And she would change him forever. (A Walk to Remember.)
•One Ring To Rule Them All. (The Lord of the Rings)
•Don’t go near the water. (Jaws)
2. Characters
Now that you know a little about what is going to happen in your story, you need to think about who it is going to happen to. Start with your lead character. You need to decide a lot of things about this person if you are going to write a believable and interesting protagonist. A good way to start is to fill out a character chart for each main character in your story. As you write more and more, you might not need this tool, but I still find them very useful. If I am deep into a rewrite on my novel and I can’t remember what color eyes a minor character has, all I have to do is grab my binder, flip to the character charts, and I have it written down. It would be pretty embarrassing to say a character had green eyes and then later say they were blue because you couldn’t remember. Details make characters deeper, and eye color is a basic one. Check out my free character chart on my website to get you started. http://teenageauthor.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/characterchart.pdf
The most important thing you need to decide about your main character is: What do they want desperately? And how am I going to not let them have it? (Until the end.) If you write a story about a boy who plays football and is really great and gets a scholarship to Texas A & M and goes on to play Pro ball and wins the Super Bowl… Well, that’s not very exciting. No one wants to read about the happiest person alive. What’s fun about that? So, to make that story work, you have to make your lead character struggle. Maybe he had a birth defect and the doctors said he would never walk, let alone play a sport. Then you have a lead character who wants to prove the doctors wrong. Maybe his parents are afraid and they fight about whether or not to let him play. Maybe there is a bully on the team who mocks him. This lead character must stand up against a lot of ridicule and adversity to get on the team, let alone prove that he can play and become a star. Now this story is a little more interesting. Do you see how that works? Take your lead character and make them suffer a bit.
3. Backdrop
Now that you know what is going to happen, and who it is going to happen to, you need to know where it is going to happen. If you are writing a story about kids in a regular high school, you won’t have to work as hard on Backdrop as you would if you were writing a fantasy about kids in a dragon slaying school in an imaginary land.
Reality:
If your place is a real place, you still need to know some details about it to make your writing realistic. Nothing bothers me more as a reader than to read a book about Alaska and know (because I was raised there) that this author didn’t even try to research Alaska. For a book like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the author had to know about the hometown of all the girls, plus the different places the girls went to fir their summer, California, a movie-making camp, and Greece.
You can find out lots of information online about every place in the world. I wrote about Russia in my first book. I have never been there, but I did extensive research on food, weather, police procedures, the homeless, language, and anything else that I could think of that would make my story more realistic.
If you are writing about a made up town, you still need to brainstorm characteristics about it. Is it in the north or south? What time of the year does the story take place? Is it rural or urban? Even made up towns need to be realistic places to the reader.
Fantasy:
If you are writing a fantasy, Backdrop is equally important to your characters. You have to show your fantasy world in a way that readers can actually know what it is like to be there. Look at books like The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia stories, Harry Potter, Eragon. All these books have a fantasy world that is portrayed very well and believably. You could spend months or years brainstorming a fantasy world. Don’t get stuck here forever. You might consider making a three-ring notebook with dividers for different cities, languages, or creatures, so that it is all organized and easy to refer back to.
4. Plot
Now you’ve got an idea, some characters, and a place, but do you have a plot? A plot is what happens to the characters that keeps the reader turning the pages. There had better be something, otherwise, you don’t have a story. A plot needs conflict. Think about your character’s goals and fears. How could you sabotage those in some way to make the reader worry for your character?
Check out my free novel plotting chart on my website to give you some ideas of what to do with your plot. http://teenageauthor.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/novelplottingchart.pdf
I once had the privilege of attending Mount Hermon Christian Writer’s Conference. I took the fiction mentoring clinic with bestselling author James Scott Bell. He has the best book on earth for plot called, Plot and Structure. I highly recommend reading it. I’m reading it again!
If you have these four ingredients: idea, characters, backdrop, and plot, you are ready to start writing. If not, spend a little more time brainstorming.
One of my favorite authors, Randy Ingermanson, has a tool to help people plot out their novels. It is called the Snowflake method. Check out his website to see if the Snowflake method could better help you in plotting out your novel. http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html
Now get to work!