Who is telling the story?

The simplest answer is your main character, right? But that’s not always the case. Plenty of books have multiple point of view characters, by which I mean the reader gets to experience the story through the eyes of more than one character. This is often, but not always, done by switching point of view (POV) from chapter to chapter.

So there’s your first choice: are you going to tell the story through multiple points of view or just one?

How goes the planning? Does your brain hurt after last week? 😅

I should have mentioned that these questions are important for everyone, not just folks planning to start a new novel. If you’re in the middle of drafting or revising, these questions are just as relevant and answering them can help you gain clarity. So don’t skip them just because you’re already in the thick of things.

This takes me back, all the way to 2018, when I had what I was sure was the final iteration of my outline. 🤣🤣🤣 To paraphrase Leslie Knope: Kerry, you beautiful tropical fish.

No one gets it 100% right the first time. Writing a novel is a process, not an event.

What I really had, I know now, was a bunch of plot points. Their only connection was that they tracked the events of my protagonist’s life. There was no real meaning, nothing juicy–just the dreaded ‘and then this happened’. And, friends, I wrote 145K words worth of ‘and this this happened’. Blerg.

Writing interesting characters that grab your readers from page 1 and keep them riveted to your story is easier said than done. We all know it’s important and we’ve all probably gotten the feedback that your character ‘just wasn’t connecting’ or ‘felt flat, two dimensional’.

Ugh, right? It could be entirely valid feedback—but what do you do with that? How do you solve it?

Frankly, when I started writing my novel, I figured I was halfway to home from the start. When someone asked me what my book was about, I’d say, “It’s about a female pirate in the 1700s…” and it didn’t really matter what I said after that. “Awesome! That’s so cool!” If I could sell everyone who said that a copy of my (still in progress) book, I’d have a guaranteed best-seller on my hands.