A couple of weeks ago, I suggested writing a very high level synopsis of your story—where it begins, where it ends, and a little bit of detail on how your MC gets from point A to point B. Now we’re going to expand upon that, a little or a lot.

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.

Did you make your November writing (or revising) plan? Have you blocked out time on your calendar and told your friends and family that this time is non-negotiable? If you did, AWESOME! If you didn’t, get after it. There’s still time.

As promised, this week we’re going to take a look at a tried and true planning tool that I use in both my own writing and my coaching practice: the Blueprint for a Book.

Confession time: I’ve done NaNo a few times but only technically ‘won’ it once, and that was after some truly marathon sessions in the last week of November. No joke, I wrote more than 20,000 in that week. 😪 (For those who don’t know, ‘winning’ NaNoWriMo means writing 50,000 words over the course of the month.)

I’m fortunate that my small city apartment means I’ll never be tagged as a Thanksgiving host, not to mention my husband’s business means that everyone expects me to show up with wine and cheese—and I am happy to oblige!

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.

One of the things I think is most critical to writing a successful novel is planning–and part of that is knowing your ‘why’? (You can download a free guide complete with exercises to help you figure that out if you sign up for my newsletter!)

And so I thought it would be appropriate to talk about some of my why’s: how knowing why I wanted to write my novel helped me take it to the next level and why book coaching felt like such a good fit for me.

In which Kerry makes her case for how spending some time thinking about your book can save you time and make your drafting process simpler and more efficient, while also freeing you creatively!