I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember – I think I was 10 years old when I wrote my first full-length novel. One of the things that I enjoy the most about writing novels is that there are so many ways to do it. Having written eight or 10 novels over the past decade and a half, I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with a number of different writing styles to see which ones work best for me (and for the period of my life I’m in and for the particular type of story).
Here are three of the most common – and quite different – ways to write a novel:
- Put together a storyboard or story arc. This is a great way to plan out or outline your novel from start to finish so that you have a clear idea of what the story is going to be all about and where you want to go with it. It enables you to explore a variety of different plots and characters, and to see on a single page how everything will come together to flesh out your novel. As a general rule, if you have little experience in writing novels, putting together an outline by creating a storyboard is a great place to start.
- Piece together your story like a jigsaw puzzle. If you want to write a novel but just have a couple of scenes in mind, or the idea of a character, or a section of dialogue, then this is a fun style of putting it on paper. It is how my most recent, 95% completed novel started out: as just a couple of descriptions and some dialogue written on scraps of paper. At one point I was literally taking one scrap from over there and another from over here with different pieces of writing on them and examining how I could make them work together.The problem with this style is that it can take a very long time to write your novel, since you aren’t beginning with any particular structure. It also has the potential of going in one direction for 20,000 words before you realize that it would be better off going in a completely different direction. This is a risk that doesn’t generally come with putting together a storyboard for your novel.
- Just start writing. This has been my traditional style of writing novels since I first began doing it. This style works best if you have the idea for the story in your head, and you know roughly who your main character is and at least three major plot points. It’s one of the most beautiful styles of writing, in my mind, because the story creates itself: as you write, new characters and plots arise, and it all flows very naturally. But it can certainly be problematic if you forget about one of your characters or storylines and aren’t keeping track, as you then have to go back to figure out what you had initially planned.