How To Finish Your First Book In Three Months Or Less
April 5, 2011Got an idea for a novel but don’t know where to start? Have some characters and a few basic plot outlines bouncing around in your head, and not sure how to get it all organized? Would you like to write a novel but are a little intimidated by the whole process? Relax, it’s pretty easy once you know how. And after you finish reading this article, you’ll have a solid plan. All you’ll need is a couple of hours a day, and plenty of coffee and you’ll be ready to go.
The first step is to create all your characters. There are plenty of ways to do this, but you want to make them as real and as concrete as you can. Describe them in much more detail than you would in your book, describe all of their strengths and weaknesses, and put them in various situations just to see how they’d react. Give yourself two weeks for this step.
After that, you’ve got to hash out the basic plot line. Break it down into small chunks, called steps. This are the smallest element within scene that can be described in one or two sentences. You can write these sequentially on a piece of paper, you can write each step on a flash card so you can rearrange them as you like, or you can use some available software that was designed specifically for this step. Give yourself a couple of weeks for this step.
Believe it or not, next comes the easiest part, the writing. Since you’ve already figured out the character and the basic plot, you shouldn’t have too much trouble actually writing everything out. Don’t worry about mistakes, or even filling a page with gibberish. Just keep writing without stopping. If you’ve done sufficient work building the characters and the plot, this part should actually be pretty easy. Give yourself a month to do this. If your book is a normal sized novel, you’ll need to write two or three thousand words a day. Get your coffee pot fired up, and turn off the TV for a month.
Now you’ve got a pretty rough draft finished, it’s time to go through and polish it. The first pass through, focus only on the spelling and grammar errors. Nothing else. The second and third pass is when you should focus on the actual writing and make any changes you think are necessary. It can be helpful to get a second opinion, but it’s not necessary. Give yourself another month for this step.
And that’s it. You’re done. Two weeks to create the characters, two weeks to figure out the story line, a month to write it, and a month to rewrite it. Once you hand it over to your agent, you can get started on your next book.
To find the best self publishing companies, head on over to the self publishing companies website today.
Leave a Reply