First-page speed-dating; full of nervous anticipation you sit down knowing nothing about the ‘date’ in front of you. Will your ‘date’ prove interesting, engaging, compelling? Will you want to spend more time with them? What attracts you extend the date to page two? …
Working hard to complete Book Three, I’m building on the foundations of a Dirty Draft. But what exactly do I have to work with? And how do I get from ‘dirty’ to ‘clean?’
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A question or an obsession; how do I write a strong opening chapter? How do I hook the reader and keep them turning the page? I spend more time on opening chapters than anything else. Here’s my compilation of tips from writers and coaches from the last three years.
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Endless posts on writing but no sign of publishing a novel; what’s taking so long?
It’s not one novel but three in a series; plus a novella to offer as a reader magnet*.
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Navigating a path from start to finish of a novel can be hard for both plotters and free-writers; enter the Skeleton Draft.
The Skeleton Draft is an idea-dump. Maybe you outlined the novel using a story structure such as the Hero’s Journey or any of the five, seven, seventeen or twenty-four point methods. Or maybe you have a scant clue of your story without a real structure in mind. The Skeleton Draft is a means to dive into the story and explore characters, conflicts and events without getting hung up on prose before you really have the idea worked out.
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Never mind that I’m 65% through editing and still don’t know if the novel is any good: do I have a professional working draft?
A professional working draft comes at the end of one or more rounds of internal edits; no copy editing, line editing or proof reading. We’re still in the early stages. In short, does the manuscript work?
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While I don’t use Fictionary‘s software tool itself, I’ve learned to construct the grandmother of spreadsheets to track their editing list of thirty-eight elements of story. It’s become a valuable check-list for planning and writing, way before the editing stage.
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Outlining a book? Why not? Sixty, seventy, eighty thousand words or more. That’s your typical novel. Somehow you have to get to there from a blank page. Unless you’re an accomplished free-writer, that’s where an outline can help.
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There are many ways to start writing a book, both fiction and non-fiction. Without a first draft, you don’t have a book, just an idea. But a completed first draft is just that – a beginning and not an end.
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How many drafts does it take to get out of the edit toward a published book?