How to write a novel

Let me preface this article on how to write a novel by saying that my book on the topic has all the best advice I know: How to Write a Novel: 49 Rules for Writing a Stupendously Awesome Novel That You Will Love Forever.

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How to write a novel. We should probably first agree that this is a rather large topic. One might even call it rotund, ginormous, massive, weighty, of-gargantuan-proportions, etc. But I often hear from would-be writers with a very common sentiment:

I want to write a novel, I think I can write a novel, but for the love of Tim Gunn, how in the world do you write a novel?

And that brings us to the most important advice I can offer in this How to Write a Novel overview. If you try and hold the entire novel in your head all at once and attempt to imagine it in its entirety and all of its various ins and outs, your brain will suddenly become so heavy that you will topple over backwards and pass out.

Don’t be intimidated by the bigness of the task. The best thing you can do is to break a novel up into some comprehensible components that you can think about in a coherent fashion and try as hard as you can not to be intimidated.

Contrary to the myth of the writer sitting down blindly and letting their inspiration spill onto the page, whether you’re a thorough outliner or an adherent to the school of write-as-you-go-I’ll-edit-later, I highly recommend having at least a rough sketch of the below elements in place before you sit down and type “Chapter 1: It was a dark and stormy night.”

How to write a novel

Here are the basic steps for how to write a novel:

1. Choose an idea you love
2. Flesh out your main plot
3. Pick your perspective
4. Add obstacles and intrigue
5. Round out your characters
6. Make sure your setting is memorable
7. Find a unique voice
8. Plan a killer climax
9. Write the thing!

How to choose an idea for a novel

Choose an idea you love enough to neglect everything you enjoy in life. You’re going to need to care enough to block out distractions and power through even when the going gets tough.

Don’t write about what you think you should write about, and don’t chase trends.

Instead, pick that idea that you just can’t shake, even if it seems a little crazy.

For further reading:

• How to choose an idea for a novel
• Why authors shouldn’t chase trends
• Is your premise an archetype or a cliche?
• Why it’s important to know your book’s genre

How to flesh out your main plot

Once you have an idea, get started fleshing out the main plot arc.

This is the spine of the book. It’s what happens, it’s what you build around,  it’s the main event. When people ask you what your book is about, this is what you tell them.

I like to think of every novel, whether it’s literary fiction or genre fiction, as a quest. Every quest has:

1. A starting place
2. One first step
3. A journey (the biggest chunk of the novel)
4. An ending

Take a look at all of your favorite novels – they have a starting place, then something sets the main character’s world ajar, then the character embarks on a literal or figurative journey with significant obstacles, and then an ending, where the character either ends up somewhere new or ends up back where they started but irrevocably changed.

There are millions of variations on this quest, whether it’s a journey through the mind, battling personal demons, or flying through outer space, but every single novel is about a character or characters who start in one place and end up somewhere else.

That journey, physical or emotional or hopefully both, is the heart of the novel.

For further reading:

• Do you have a plot?
• How to organize a chapter
• How to outline a novel
• Everything you need to know about novel word counts

How to pick your perspective

One of the most common mistakes I see unpublished authors make is a mishmash of a perspective. Excessive head jumping and a confusing POV will sink a novel.

Instead: choose a perspective and stick to it.

There are two main temporal choices to choose between: past tense and present tense.

Past tense (He said, I said) is the more “classic” approach, whereas present tense (He says, I say) can feel more modern and convey a bit more immediacy. Whichever one you choose is up to you, but there’s really only one rule: stick with the one you choose.

Next, you’ll need to choose your overall perspective. Here are your choices:

• First person: Told from a specific narrator’s perspective. “I did this, I did that.”
• Second person: Written as if the narrative happens from the reader’s perspective, or as if it’s a conversation with an invisible character. “You did this, you did that.”
• Third person limited: Tied to one character’s thoughts and perspective at a time. If the perspective shifts, it’s almost as if the camera is handed to another character. “He did this, she did that, but he wasn’t sure why she did what she did.”
• Third person omniscient: Kind of like a god’s-eye perspective. Sometimes this means an all-seeing narrator who is almost another character, other times it’s just a dispassionate voice describing thoughts and actions. “He did this, she did that, he was thinking this, she was thinking that.”

Try a few different approaches and see what feels the most natural.

Whatever you do: stick with the one you choose. If you’re going to shift the perspective, mark the change with a chapter break.

For further reading:

• How to choose your novel’s perspective
• First person vs. third person
• Third person omniscient vs. third person limited vs. head jumping

How to add obstacles and intrigue

Give the characters obstacles of increasing intensity, with ups and downs along the way.

If the most challenging obstacle your main character faces happens in the first half of the book: the reader will be bored in the second half. If your character gets everything they want and always has “up” moments: the reader will be bored with the predictability. If your character only has “down” moments and things get steadily worse and worse with no hope whatsoever: your reader will either be horrifically depressed or start to think everything is unintentionally funny.

Whether the main obstacle is an arch-villain, their own personal demons, or a powerful army of rhetorical questions–the biggest battle is in the end, and there are gains, setbacks, and smaller obstacles along the way. Better still if the obstacles and the intensity of the emotions steadily increase and swing back and forth as the novel goes along.

For further reading:

• Embrace conflict in a novel
• How to craft a good mystery in a novel
• John Green and dynamic character relationships

How to flesh out your characters

At the center of a novel’s quest is a protagonist, or possibly a small group of protagonists, but for the purposes of this section let’s just stick with the protagonist as a singular. Said protagonist can be a man, a woman, a child, an alien, a Chihuahua, a mold spore, or anything else you can think of trust me it’s been done before.

But every single protagonist, no matter what species, has one thing in common: they want something. The novel is about trying to get that thing they want.

Now, the best protagonists are complex individuals who may want multiple things. They may think they want one thing but in reality want another, or they may want two things that are at odds with each other. But once you know what a character wants, their personality (funny? brave? weak?) becomes an expression of how they go about getting it.

Every additional character also has something they want, and that may perchance be at odds with what your protagonist wants. The villain, if you have one, either wants the same thing as your protagonist (competition) or the exact opposite of what your character wants (adversarial), and is nearly, but not quite, as powerful as your protagonist.

For further reading:

• What is a character arc?
• How to flesh out a character
• How to raise the stakes
• Character and plot are inseparable
• What makes characters sympathetic and unsympathetic
• What do your characters want?
• 7 reasons your characters feel flat

How to write a great setting for your novel

The setting is more than just where your novel takes place. A great setting is woven into the very fabric of the novel. The best settings have:

• Change underway – Something is happening in the world that is changing, whether war is coming, new moral values are ascendant, or something else that is roiling the calm. Whether the novel is a massive multi-country canvass or a very personal coming of age story, something is changing.
  
• A personality – The setting is different than the real world not just in where it’s set, but also in its value system and character. Maybe it’s a funny world, maybe it’s ruthless world, maybe it’s all totally punk rock YEAH MAN, but it has its own personality.
  
• Unfamiliarity – A great setting shows us something we haven’t seen and makes us look at our own world in a new way.

For further reading:

• What makes a great setting
• How to write clear physical description

How to find your voice

Much like love, style don’t come easy. Our first attempts at crafting a signature style inevitably feel like imitation. But if you write enough and keep trying and keep pushing yourself, eventually you will arrive at your own personal style that is nothing like anyone else’s and voila, your novel will have a voice.

Even if you initially feel like everything you’re writing is terrible: charge ahead anyway. The only way to get to a great voice is to keep going.

For further reading:

• How to craft a great voice
• What is the “narrative voice?”
• How to write good dialogue
• Do you suffer from one of these writing maladies?

How to write a great novel climax

And at the end of the novel (it is near the end, yes?), your characters will face their biggest obstacles, and all of the simmering conflicts and plots and subplots all come to a head. It helps if the climax is your best, most dramatic scene, when the moments have the biggest weight and the characters are experiencing their highest highs and their lowest lows.

A great climax will have your reader cheering or crying or laughing or all of the above. Hopefully in a good way.

In order to craft a good climax, it’s important to plan as much as possible. The sooner you know roughly what is going to happen in your climax, the sooner you can begin laying the groundwork in the plot.

For further reading:

• How to write a good climax
• The climax should resolve your character’s desires

Now write it!

If you have a sense of these components before you sit down to write you will already have the most difficult elements in place. You will have a sense of who your character(s) is/are, you will have a sense of where they are and where they’re going, and a rough idea of how they get from Point A to Point B.

To be sure, the characters will surprise you along the way, certain things won’t make sense when they’re on the page and you’ll have to adjust on the fly, but as long as these key elements are in place there is no reason why the idea of your novel should make your brain shut down.

Then all you have to accomplish is the mere trifle of spending hundreds of hours writing it.

Oh. And don’t forget to revise like crazy.

For further reading:

• How to choose a title
• You don’t have to write every day
• Five ways to stay motivated while writing a novel
• How to get over writer’s block
• The solution to every writing problem that has ever existed
• Ten Commandments for the Happy Writer
• Writing advice database

Need help with your book? I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and coaching!

For my best advice, check out my online classes, my guide to writing a novel and my guide to publishing a book.

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Art: A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch by Harriet Browne