How I craft a story

Some authors begin their novels by sitting down at a keyboard (or taking up pen and paper) and starting to write. They follow the story wherever it leads them. While I find this approach courageous, I’ve never used it in the seven novels I’ve written. I know how my books will end before I write the first sentence.

My novels start with a story outline. In the outline, I develop all the plot points and establish the major characters. After refining the story outline, I break the narrative into individual scenes. Since I usually write in third person, I decide which character will be the focus of the scene. My rule is only to reveal the thoughts of the featured character in that scene. This adds suspense and surprises since the reader will never know more than the featured character.

I don’t always write scenes chronologically. At times, I’ll create the ending scene first and then fill in the previous ones. In fact, I wrote a trilogy of novels that began with the last scene of the third book.

Inevitably, I uncover inconsistencies and unrealistic  actions by the characters as I flesh out the plot. When these inconsistencies occur later in the story, correcting them sometimes affects previous scenes. That’s why I also create a timeline with a description of each scene. It makes editing much easier and more accurate.

With all the scenes complete, I usually put the novel aside for a while, sometimes up to a month. Then I read the manuscript again, looking for any snags in the prose. Anything that’s not clear or feels clunky, I rewrite. And often, rewrite again.

I pay special attention to dialog and attribution. (The “she said, angrily” kind of descriptions that accompany character dialog.) When not handled deftly, this can really bog down a story – or fail to create drama effectively.

A new tool I’ve adopted is the “read aloud” function in Word. This catches a lot of small words writers often miss in their haste. Convinced that I’ve done the best possible job I can manage, I turn the manuscript over to an editor. They invariably find gobs of mistakes I missed.

No one I know writes “The end” on the last page of a manuscript. But finishing a full draft is just the beginning of the long grind to publication day. More on that in future posts.