A lot of people dream of writing books. I tried for years, and actually found it was the environment I was trying to use!
I tried pen and paper, typewriter, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and nothing was working…
Until I got Ywriter. I was kind of surprised that I was able to write so fast. Literally, a book was done in three months. Scrivener is Ywriter on steroids, essentially.
So what are the 5 easy steps to writing your novel?
- Set a deadline. If you give yourself deadlines, it makes it much easier to get things done! If you don’t set deadlines, and let other people know what they are… years can go by and nothing will happen! You’ve got to set a deadline, and commit to it by making other people known! Like… starting a blog and saying “here’s my deadlines!”
- Set your word count in Scrivener. Easy. You’ve got a scene target (I don’t use those) and project targets. You pick a word count (130,000 words, 85,000 words, etc) and you put this number in the second window – 1667. Why? Because at the end of 30 days you’ll have 50,000 words!
Start brainstorming. This parts easy, but you’ll be surprised what you end up with! Take a piece of paper, and think out every noun and verb you can think of to describe what you’re novel’s about. - Use a Scrivener template or make your own. I’ve downloaded a few, but essentially I just use mine. It’s the same as the Scrivener fiction template, but with 3 parts, and 7 chapters per part, and 7 scenes per chapter. I’m influenced by environment, so seeing the colors applied to it makes it more interesting to write in. Label your chapters with titles to describe what goes in them.
- Set Meta Tags and keywords! I’ve got a whole article on those.
- Dramatica. If you have Dramatica, then you do the long and deadly boring Dramatica interview process. Copy and paste the results into the synopsis section on each card on your corkboards. If not, start asking, who is in my book? Who else? How does character one impact character two? As you’re going through, fill in your distilled info into the synopsis! “Bob tells Ted to take a hike. Ted steals Bob’s moped.”
- WRITE! Now’s the EASY part. Everything is so structured, all you need is coffee, quiet, and time! Keep the ‘project targets’ window and move it over the bottom of the inspector. What happens in this scene? Who What When Where Why and How? What’s the conflict? What’s the confrontation? Just write!
Once you know WHERE you’re going, the writing part is easy! I’m not kidding when I say that! Just concentrate, one scene at a time! If you get your 1667 words a day in (if you keep the window open over the inspector, you’ll be amazed how you hit it EVERY day, and as it progresses, you’ll get more words in than that!)
Conclusion
It’s only a matter of getting your novel structured. After that, knowing where it’s going! It’ll change as you go there, but you have to know each step of the way! Do that, and your novel writes itself!
Someday I’ll be in a position to do a seminar on this, and I’ll show you step by step! For now, give this a try!
What’s your novel writing process? Talk about it here!
