Planning A Heart-Stopping Story
Part VII of the 8-Part BRING YOUR NOVEL TO LIFE Series
Over the last six lessons, you’ve figured out your theme, and you’ve worked out at least one and possibly several subthemes. You’ve learned how to use blended scenes, intercuts, and cliffhangers to work both themes and subthemes into your work. You have great conflict waiting to happen. What do you do next?
All of our discussion of themes and subthemes comes down to this. It’s time to figure out how your story is going to go.
After more than 17 years of writing novels as my full-time job, I’ve tried every method I could find for getting my stories into order without so overworking them during the outline process that I no longer wanted to write the book. This is the method I currently use, and am still refining. It’s simple, it’s quick, and it’s flexible—all three advantages which make writing more fun, and keep your work fresher for you. This is going to seem like the strangest imaginable way to get a passionate, compelling, suspenseful story on the page…but it completely blows away waiting for your Muse to inspire you in terms of effectiveness.
I am a heavy user of plot cards—3×5 index cards or the software equivalent–upon which I write one single sentence for each scene. That sentence outlines the characters and the conflict that will occur in that scene.
(Don’t understand scenes? The Scene Creation Workshop will help you get the hang of them. http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/scene-workshop.html )
To write your novel, you’ll need to know:
• How many plot cards/ scenes you’ll need for your book,
• Which theme or subtheme (or blend) you’ll be dealing with for each scene,
• Which characters will be in each scene,
• Who the POV (Point Of View) character—the person through whose eyes the story is told—will be.
You’ll start with basic arithmetic plus your themes and subthemes to do this to figure out how many scenes you’ll need.
An average first novel in the current market is around 90,000 words long (if you’re writing for the adult, not children’s or YA markets).
• So we’ll start with 90,000 words as our target length.
For this example, we’re going to assume that you have one main theme and two subthemes that you’ve decided will each run the complete length of the book.
• Theme: HEROINE sets out to win a writing contest and prove to her dubious husband that her dream of being a writer is not a waste of time.
• Subtheme #1: HEROINE meets man at work who encourages her writing, and her pursuit of fulfillment, leading her to consider leaving her current relationship.
• Subtheme #2: HUSBAND watches his wife’s life change as she pursues her dreams, and he starts wondering what happened to his own dreams.
Let’s further say that you’ve decided your scenes will average a thousand words each, so you’ll need about ninety of them to get a full-length novel. (In real life, the math is rarely this easy–mine scenes generally average 1500 to 1750 words each, but every book and every scene is different.)
• Target Length of Book