The Write Stuff - Writing Tips To Help You Complete Your Book
Tip #1 - Planning Is Everything!
As soon as people learn I’m an author, certain non-writer types inevitably declare the following: “I want to write a book”. Or, “I’m writing a book”. As we chat, and they very often explain the plot in great detail (sidenote: see a future tip for why I think that’s a terrible idea) they invariably ask for tips.
I’ve spent my entire writing life NOT giving advice. I’d always prefer to write than speak about writing. But recently I chatted to a would-be writer who was stuck. They were writing a novel or at least they had been writing but the process had ground to a halt because they were stuck on what happened next. After sitting down for several sessions where they’d just stared at the screen then started browsing social media instead of writing, they had given up. When I enquired as to whether they’d written an outline first they declared “No, I wanted it to come out fresh”. Except, as I pointed out to them, it wasn’t coming out. “But I thought that’s what you writers did”.
I imagine some authors do just make it up. But the successful writers I know personally don’t. Just like me they plan. When I told the would-be writers this it was as though I had come down from a mountain carrying two chiselled tablets. Which got me thinking. Perhaps I know some things that might be useful to others. So here is some stuff I know, in the form of a series of “tips”. Perhaps some would-be’s might find them useful. Perhaps that would-be is you in which case I they help you in your writing. These are certainly things I wished someone had told me when I sat down to write my very first novel.
According To Plan
There’s an episode of The Simpsons where the Flanders home is destroyed and the neighbours helpfully decide to fix it. Except there’s no blueprint so the rebuild features a toilet in the kitchen, dirt painted to look like floorboards, and the building eventually collapses when someone closes the front door.
Writing an outline for your book will mean you avoid constructing a similar house of horrors. Or worse, you reach a debilitating plot roadblock on page 10. Or page 25. Or page 125. You can’t figure out the next story beat, or you realise the plot is too similar to an already existing work, or you decide you actually want to write a completely different book. So you give up.
Thorough preparation provides Future-You with a roadmap to follow. It’s proof of concept, evidence you’ve got a whole story here. Make your outline as detailed as you like. Got that killer opening, or closing, paragraph already formed? In it goes. Worried that a plot point isn’t quite right? Drop in notes of your concerns and maybe Future-You will know the answer.
Keep working on that outline until you’re satisfied with the result, until you’re raring to begin the first draft. Preparing like this will help you to thread through recurring themes, keep characters on-brand, and spot story weaknesses. The more you iron out the kinks in the outline, hopefully the less major structural work there will be later down the line. Changes are gonna come, but planning well can help limit their number and the severity of their effect on the overall book. It’s far easier to replot a story in an outline than it is across a full draft.
My outlines for a novel usually consist of forty to fifty pages, containing not just the chapter by chapter narrative but everything from dialogue—single lines to whole conversations—research notes, character biographies, potential alternative takes if I can’t decide which scenes or settings I prefer, and links to visual media that assist in crafting descriptions. Some of this will change on the day, but having the outline to a story that has a start, middle, and conclusion, ensures I never sit down not knowing where I’m going.
