Oct 25 2008
Novel Writing Secret Formula - The Big Picture
Now that you’ve chosen a genre and a basic plot (and I mean basic!), you’re going to need an overview of what you’re going to do. This will help you understand where you are on the path. When you can see the end, it’s always easier to keep walking… er, writing.
Open a new document in your word processor program and do a couple of things with it:
1. Add a page number to the top of the page. Use the program to do it so the numbers will refresh automatically and… drumroll, please… you can write in your working title for your novel. You really need a working title, even if you end up choosing something else by the end. You need a name so you can save an easily find the file, and so you can talk about your work-in-progress to someone who will encourage you. If you can’t even tell them a title, well… you look like a wannabe-writer who can’t even come up with a title. 
2. Just like I’ve added numbers to the beginning of these paragraphs, write the numbers 1-13 on the page, each number on its own line. These are going to be your “chapters”, for now. You may end up with more or less than this number, but this is a good place to start.
3. Think of an interesting twist that can come right, smack in the middle of the novel. It has to be something that’s going to turn everything around. What the hero wanted isn’t actually the right thing, or she can’t reach it, or his identity isn’t what everyone thought it was. This is going to be section 8… kind of like in the military. Everything goes crazy for a moment.
But you have to make certain that the twist doesn’t change the genre of the story. A romance can’t suddenly become a murder mystery. A police procedural can’t suddenly become sci-fi. The twist has to be within the genre.
