It’s the last Sunday of the Week, so it’s time for an update of how things are going for me as a writer. With National Novel Writing Month just around the corner, I’ve been working hard on preparing to draft Casualty of Silence, the fifth book in my Blake Heira series. I can almost hear you saying, “But you only have two novels published? How can you be drafting book five?” Let me explain.
Writing a novel isn’t as easy as it sounds. Publishing one is even harder. It takes a lot of time and a lot of people even for an independent author such as myself. Something a lot of people have asked me is how I do this. Sometimes, they wonder how I find the time (stop watching TV and you’ll be shocked at how much time you suddenly have), but usually they don’t know where to start.
There are tons of books out there about writing novels. They offer many tips, tricks, and often contradict one another. You can read about some that I’ve enjoyed and use in my About page. You can also get a lot of information from YouTube, such as this awesome video by The Kim Reaper, Kim Chance.
My process is a modification of the Snowflake Method, created by Randy Ingermanson (you can find out more about this at his website, or in Fiction Writing for Dummies or Writing a Novel Using the Snowflake Method). This is what I do from beginning to end:
- Write a one sentence summary for the book, proposing the story question.
- Expand this sentence into a single summary paragraph, showing 3 major turning points, setup, and the end.
- Create a character list with names and the story role for each.
- Create character summaries for each character with name, single sentence description of their story in the book, motivation, conflict, goal, epiphany (how the character changes in the story) and paragraph summary of their part of the story from their perspective.
- Write a five paragraph summary of the book, focusing on setup for each major turning point and incorporating subplots from the character summaries from phase 4.
- Create full Character Charts for all major characters and summary charts for minor characters.
- Write five page synopsis, including subplots (this is optional for me, but it often helps with phase 8).
- Develop scene list. This is a blow by blow of the entire book, broken up into Scenes (where things are happening) and Sequels (where people are reacting to their actions). A great resource for this can be found here. This takes a lot of time.
- Write 1st Draft. This takes me about 2 months straight.
- Let novel rest for 3-8 weeks. Usually, I’ll do some other writing goal, like prepping my next story or doing editing on another book.
- Alpha read novel. This is where I read the book as if I were the reader, looking for plot holes and getting feedback from my critique group. Edit to create my 2nd Draft.
- Beta read novel. This is where I send the book to people who graciously agree to read the book and give me feedback. They look for things that aren’t clear (it made sense in my head, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense on the page). I use their feedback to edit and create my 3rd Draft.
- Send my book to my editor.
- Create 4th draft based on editor’s comments.
- Get cover designed.
- Proofread – Create Final Draft
- Format book into mobi (for Amazon), epub (for everyone else), and print formats. Check to make sure there are no issues.
- Order proof copies. Reformat as necessary.
- Publish.
As you can see, that’s a lot of work.
Book 3, Corruption of Blood, is currently in stage 12 and my awesome beta readers have been giving me great feedback, including some significant formatting errors.
Book 4, Arena of Night, is at the end of phase 9. I need to write about 2 more chapters for it to be done.
Book 5, Casualty of Silence, is at the end of Phase 6. I have 3 more characters to chart and I’ll move on to the scene list.
Book 6, Untitled as yet, is at the end of phase 1. I know the premise, but that’s all.
As always, thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments. See you next Sunday!
