Writing

So spend some time thinking about your book. What’s the setting going to be like? How old is your ideal audience? What flaw have you chosen for your character, and what does your interest in such a flaw say about your outlook on the world? What point are you trying to make by exploring this particular flaw? How does this character’s journey reflect

If I had scenes that were so boring I didn't want to write them, then there was no way anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn't love it, no one would.

twenty is somewhat of a middle ground, a compromise so to speak. While creating this book, I tested this process by writing a series of three different novels, and what I found was that twenty scenes was low enough to feel attainable at this early stage. However, it was also high enough that I could later expand on this list and still have a fully

the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus

A novel is both a larger story and an accumulation of many smaller stories,

open a new document or flip to a fresh page in your notebook. At the top, write down your story’s working title and premise. From there, you’ll want to fill out your story’s conflict, your protagonist’s personal struggle, and your Dramatic Question.

I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and setting out to write I realized I didn’t even own

Now that I've decided this is the novel I want to write, the first thing I do is put down everything I already know about the book. These are usually the ideas that exploded into my mind and made me want to write the story in the first place. Sometimes it's a character or situation, sometimes it's a magical system or a setting. Whatever it is, I wr