5 Simple Steps to Plan your Novel!

Hey everyone! To make up for the shorter post this week I took some time to write a 5 step, how-to guide on planning your stories. This is my own method, and it’s made the daunting task of writing novels more manageable and easier for me. I hope it works for you too!! Let’s get started!

Writing a novel is no easy task. It’s a tough gig, and taking that first step can seem so impossibly daunting, especially when we’re starting out. 

Believe me, I’ve been there. 

Countless unused concepts, abandoned first chapters, crumpled up pieces of paper littering the trash. It can be a lot.

Luckily, I’ve compiled my 5 steps to easily plan your novel and get the train moving. This won’t get you all the way to publishing, but it will give you the structure you need to begin your manuscript with confidence and ease.

So let’s jump right in with step number one.

1. Visualise your Setting

This is the first step in writing any story. This is the ethereal concept you’ve had in your head for a while, the idea of a story set in feudal Japan or a distant galaxy or a subterranean bunker. You could call this the ‘vibe’ of your story, if you like.

This stage is the most free, and the most fun. What sort of story do you want to tell? A tragedy, a comedy, a romance, a philosophical tale with layers of symbolism? Maybe a political thriller, or maybe a fairy tale. 

From this idea we can get a little more concrete. Try to visualise your influences. For example, when writing The Whispering Depths, I knew I wanted to tell a fantasy story, I knew I wanted it to have elements of tragedy and to focus on one single protagonist with a deeply personal, human motivation. From there I knew I wanted elements of pirate folklore and thalassophobia, with healthy doses of Lovecraftian horror and inspiration from Greek myth. 

This all comes before plot and story. This is your idea, your foundation, the picture you have in your mind before any specific details are conjured. Before even character and conflict comes the idea. 

2. Plan your Conflict

So you’ve got your setting. You know you’re writing a noir, New York style detective novel or a fun, cozy love story set in a coffee shop.

Now comes the crux of your story. The conflict. The reason people will read your story. For this, you will at least need to know who your main character will be, and what emotions you want your story to convey in your reader. 

A great fill-in-the-blank style sentence I often use is:

_____ wants _____, and if they don’t get it _____ will happen. For example, Frodo wants to destroy the ring, and if he doesn’t Sauron will conquer the world. 

Now, your stakes don’t need to be anywhere this high, and your story doesn’t need to be anywhere near this grand, but your story needs this fundamental aim. Your characters must want something, and they must take steps to obtain it, and there have to be consequences if they don’t achieve it. 

Once you have this basic motivation nailed down, you can start to think about what obstacles these characters might face in achieving their goal. Frodo has to overcome a long journey, giant spiders, orcs, warring tribes of men, goblins, balrogs, it sometimes seems like the entire world is standing against him.

That’s good. That’s what you want. These conflicts, obstacles, and motivations will be the thing that defines your story.

For example, we know we’re writing a fun space opera with wizards and laser swords and space ships. We have our farm-boy hero, Luke, and our vast empire, with an evil cyborg overlord armoured in black. So Luke wants to become a Jedi to fight the empire, or else they will take over the galaxy. We then look at what challenges him. Maybe his beloved mentor dies. Maybe the empire has a doomsday weapon that he can’t possibly overcome. Maybe his best friend is imprisoned in a block of metal and he loses his hand. Maybe Darth Vader defeats him at every turn.

These are the stories we love. Stories of adversity, and of our protagonist being challenged, and either overcoming or succumbing to these trials.

3. Think of your Character Arc

To recap, we now know where we are, who we’re following, what they’re trying to achieve, what stands in their way, and what will happen if they fail. This is a wonderful start.

The next thing we need to consider is the internal arcs of the characters. Yes, we’ve got all these obstacles and interesting twists, but how does that make our protagonist/s feel? How does it inform their decision making, their reactions, and their emotions?

Maybe it would be interesting for them to become worn down by the mounting obstacles, maybe we want them to become a fuller, wiser person as they learn to control their emotions, maybe we want them to learn to embrace a certain aspect of themselves to become self-realised. Maybe we want them to turn evil over the course of the story. 

This is your character arc, and it will be informed by your setting, by your conflict, and by your character flaws.

Almost every interesting character has some flaw. Interesting stories explores how these flaws shape the person as they interact with the world. 

This character arc is what makes characters relatable, and what makes readers emotionally invested. You can have the most outrageous and fantastical setting and conflict, but if your character flaws and arcs are realistic and understandable, your setting will feel real to your audience.

We know Jack Sparrow is a selfish pirate, that’s his flaw, but the reason we love him is because he secretly has a heart of gold, which is revealed during key moments of conflict throughout the first three movies. For example, when he sacrifices his own chance at immortality to save the life of Will Turner, his friend.

4. Work Backwards

When developing character arc concepts, we will usually arrive at the end of the story. I want character x to demonstrate that they’ve learned concept y during their final confrontation with the dark lord by doing action z. This is the culmination of your arc, and if this idea comes to your during your development of the arc, that’s a very positive sign. This step is not necessarily universal, as some writers like to have a beginning in mind and allow the story to reveal itself to them. I am not one of these writers. I prefer a scaffold, a skeleton of my story from which to work. From the beginning I like to know where my characters are going, how they’ll react, and what the consequences of their actions will be. I find it helps me to plan arcs and twists and emotional outcomes. That’s not to say my stories never surprise me, it just happens less frequently for me than other writers.

So this step is only for you fellow story architects. 

For example, when writing The Whispering Depths (NO SPOILERS!!) I already had a loose idea of how the ending would play out. As I was writing I certainly had more ideas to add, or interesting ways that I could tie the events in the story to the ending, but the final destination remained largely the same. 

If this step resonates with you, I highly recommend working backwards from the ending you want to help you find the meat of your story, the middle sections and the conflict, which can often be so hard to pin down.

5. Start to Plan your Scenes

This is your final step before you really begin writing. Again, this step is more geared towards architects, and if you choose to start writing before this all the more freedom to you. But I like to plan all the major events beforehand, and this step really helps me to have a firm grasp on all the above steps. 

Personally, I like to write one long summary of the story. Every main detail, and some emotional ones, all written like a map for me to follow. It doesn’t have to be artistic or well written, it’s a brute force method of following the tracks that you’ve already set out. It usually amounts to “He goes here, meets this person, says this, they fight, he’s sad about it, they leave and go here, etc…” 

This allows me to see if there’s any problem areas I need to fix up ahead of time, and what flows well. Then, when I’m writing, if I don’t know how to resolve a scene, or don’t know what to say next, I can always refer to my little guide, and know roughly what needs to happen. In a way, writing my actual manuscript is more akin to expanding on my bare-bones guide, instead of inventing an entire story, prose-and-all, in one go.

This, I’ve found, can also help with writers’ block. If I’m ever lethargic, and don’t want to write today, I can always skip ahead. I can pick a future scene that I’m very excited about, and write that instead to get my mind back into gear, and then come back and fill in the previous sections later. 

As long as I stick to the plan, they should flow well from on to the next regardless of the order I write them in. If they don’t, it can always be fixed in later drafts and editing. 

So, there we are. My 5 steps to planning your story. I really hope you’ve gotten something out of this, even if it’s only one or two ideas that might help you to achieve your goals in creative writing. 

Thanks so much for reading, make sure to subscribe to our mailing list to stay up to date on the blog, and watch this space for more writing tips, reviews, short stories, updates and a whole lot more.

You can pre-order The Whispering Depths now on amazon, and we’ll hopefully have a paperback edition running soon!!

Thanks for reading!