How to write a novel

I get loads of emails from people telling me they have a great idea for a novel … but they don’t actually know where to start. Or how long a chapter should be. Or how much they should plan in advance.

I could write loads on this subject, but to save your brain cells (which you can apply to your manuscript), I’ve broken it down into easy-to-read bullet points. These follow on from my post called ‘Five tips to start your novel‘, which is about characterisation, tone of voice, and story.

1. Plan your plot
Write one page on your basic plot. My first novel, THE MAKING OF MIA, went something like this. ‘Girl is overweight, wants to work on magazines, is bullied at school, gets job in shitty cafe, leaves to work in pub, meets love interest, loses weight, finds out about magazine temping, gets a job at publishing house…’ Okay, so it’s a little dry, but you need the bones of your story before you begin. Don’t worry about detail, but make sure the key points are in there.

2. Expand your plot
This is where the fun really starts. Take each key point, and flesh it out into a paragraph or two. So, using MIA as an example again, the ‘Girl is overweight, wants to work on magazines, is bullied at school’ bit could be expanded to key scenes where we see the protagonist at school and how she’s bullied, an example of her overeating and why she overeats, and a scene where we really get to understand why she loves magazines so much.

3. Focus on characters
You should already have an idea of your main characters, but now you have a fleshed out plot, it’s time to look at them again. Think about how each would react in each key point. Does it seem realistic? Is it interesting? Make a note of each characters’: full names, hair colour, eye colour, where they live, their relationships to others, their jobs, their favourite outfit. Refer back to this all the time. When my copy editor was looking through my second novel, SPOTLIGHT, she noticed all my characters had blond hair and blue eyes. Oops.

4. Plan your chapters
Every writer is different, but I plan to write a novel of 110,000 words, with approximately 25 chapters. Each chapter is roughly 4000 words. For those of you who are better at maths than I am (most of you), you’ll see I have an extra 10,000 words floating around. With every novel, I tend to delete about 30,000 words after I’ve written the first draft, so over-writing a little bit gives me a bit more leeway when I’m hacking up my beloved manuscript.

To plan your chapters look at your extended plot, and divide it up as naturally as possible. Think about how many words you’d like for each chapter, and then try and visualise how each bit of your plot may look. This sounds easier than it is, but if you have, say, a bit where someone finds out something dramatic vs something a bit boring, you know the dramatic bit will be longer. Make sense?

Once you’ve divided up your plot and you’ve put them into chapters look at them again. Each chapter should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

5. Flesh out your chapters
Some authors write a single line to describe what’s going to happen in their chapters, and if that works for you, great. I, however, like to know what’s going to happen in each chapter in more detail. Chapters are made up of scenes, so I try to work out three to four scenes for each chapter … meaning each scene is 1000 words. Just like chapters, each scene should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – and should end on something interesting so the reader wants to keep reading. Think about EastEnders. It’s half an hour of storylines made up of different scenes with different characters. You can have one long scene with a couple of characters, several scenes each with different scenarios, or lots of scenes that follow one character. It’s entirely up to you.

6. Start writing
You’ve plotted and planned, and now there’s nothing else to do but … write! Lots of people ask me if I write the book in order. And I do. I start with chapter one, finish on chapter twenty-five (or whatever), and then I tend to go back through the book and rewrite bits and pieces to make sure it all fits together.

If you don’t know where to start – just jump in.
If you’re having trouble coming up with a brilliant first line – just jump in.

Remember, you could write the worst first line in history, but until someone else reads your manuscript they won’t know about it. Even if it’s rubbish you can keep it for now just so you can get going.

7. Trust your instinct
I’m in the middle of writing my third novel, NO PRINCE CHARMING, and I’ve come to realise my perfectly planned chapter outlines are useless. Well, they’re not that bad, but I merged chapters three and four together, spent two chapters writing what I thought would be chapter five, and during chapter six one of my characters did something unexpected so I’m going to work with that for a bit.

My point is that you can plan things in meticulous detail, but it’s not until you’re writing the damn thing that you know if it’s going to work or not.

And how do you know if it’s working? It’s instinct.

8. Remember to edit
When I’m devoting a serious amount of time to writing my manuscript, I always plan half the time it took to write it to edit it. For example, today I wrote a whole chapter. It took all day, and is 4300 words. Tomorrow I will spend half a day reading through it again and again and editing it. When you’re writing it’s important not to stop the flow to question every adjective, or every piece of dialogue. But it’s also important to leave what you’ve just written alone for a bit, and then go back to it. Then you can fix spellings, correct grammar, change dialogue and tone, and make the whole thing a bit sexier.

9. Read through what you’ve done
You may have a chapter plan, but you need to take time to read the whole of your manuscript from start to wherever you’ve got to. I do this twice a month. The problem with doing this though, is that it takes a lot of time … because you’re reading a book. If you’re halfway through your novel, you’ll have half a book to read through when you’re writing it – and that can take up to a day, depending on how fast you want to do it. It can also get really boring, because you know exactly what’s going to happen, and you’re reading the same thing over and over again.

10. Keep it to yourself
When you’re writing your manuscript you may get desperate for another person’s opinion. If they don’t have experience in writing books (or reading a lot of the genre you’re writing), I wouldn’t bother asking them. Why? Because an unfinished manuscript doesn’t really make sense. There are lots of loose ends at the start of the story, and you’ll spend a lot of time answering questions about what you’re doing, and explaining it so it makes sense. You could be using that time to write it.

11. And keep the faith
Writing a novel is time-consuming, brain-consuming, soul-consuming, and can be quite lonely. Everybody thinks they have a novel in them, but few people try to write it, and even fewer manage to finish a manuscript. Don’t be fooled by thinking it’s easy. It’s not. It takes up a huge amount of time and dedication, and it’s hard graft. But if you really want to do it, and you think you can do it … do it! Have faith in yourself, your story, and your characters. You’re creating something magical, and you never know, one day a stranger may read it and it may make their day.

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