Frankly, I don’t know how writers ever survived before the internet. I suppose they must have gone outside more.

Now, there’s definitely no substitute for real life experience, getting out there and seeing the world for yourself, meeting interesting people, even doing the job of your protagonist.

But it’s not always possible to do so for every single setting and every single character, let alone job.

And for that, we have the internet. Here are some of my favourite resources from the intarwebs, I hope you find them useful.

Plot

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the Novel Factory plotting method the most useful (having come up with it and all that) and I couldn’t imagine the tedium of trying to plot my novel without using the software: http://www.novel-software.com/

http://www.novel-software.com/novelwritingroadmap.aspx - Again, I’m going to be unashamedly biased and point out this step-by-step roadmap / formula / thing I’ve developed to help me successfully plot my novels.

Character

http://faceresearch.org/ - create a character portrait by merging the faces of lots of random people. Unfortunately a limitation is the interesting fact that the more you average people’s faces, the more attractive they get, and that it’s face only – no body.

http://whatsin-yourpocket.tumblr.com/ - this person takes pictures of what’s in people’s pockets – great for inspiration for more in-depth character development.

http://www.markmenjivar.com//projects/you_are_what_you_eat - this photographer carried out a project taking pictures of the contents of people’s fridges – fascinating insight into character!

Location

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ - I often use Rightmove to find out more about where my characters live. It’s fantastic because you can often get blueprints, as well as pictures of the outside, inside and garden of real people’s homes. The only downside is that people tend to make their houses presentable, which is somewhat unrepresentative of reality.

http://www.eplans.com/ - fantastic resource of blueprints and computer generated pictures.

https://www.thehouseplanshop.com – more blueprints, including some commercial buildings – great for getting the nuts and bolts right, especially if you’re plotting a mystery, where the details are critical.

General

http://www.flickr.com/ - there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of amateur photographers on flickr, and searching their database can give you better quality imagery than simply searching google images.

http://www.deviantart.com/ - deviant art is a great resource of amazing artwork that can be used to inspire and build depth for character and location.

http://www.google.com/imghp - Google images. Pictures of whatever you want. From the intarwebs.

For more articles about creative writing and novel writing, visit The Novel Factory website.

Stuck for inspiration? Here are some of my favourite inspirational ideas for writing a short story:

1.  Find a poem and rewrite it as a story. (If you’re having trouble finding a poem, search for ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’ and browse through) 
2. Choose a limerick and turn that into a full blown story. (Search for Edward Lear for the master of limericks and delightful nonsense)
3.  Ask five random people to give you a noun, an adjective, a verb, colour and a random object, and write a story that incorporates them all. (or search for an online random word generator) 
4. Write a single scene story which describes one of your most painful of embarrassing memories. (the more painful it is for you to write, the better)
5.  Read synopses of poorly rated movies and base your story on one. (You can browse Netflix – even if you’re not a member – or browse the DVDs in the library or rental store – assuming those places still exist…) 
6.  Open a book at a random page, find the first new sentence and use that as the first line of your story. (Or just use it somewhere if you’re feeling wishy washy)
7. Write a story about change from the point of view of a fruit. (Or a plant or an item that is sitting on your desk) 
8. Write a story about loss from the point of view of your youngest child (regardless of whether you have any children).
9. Write a story about a terrible crime from the point of view of the criminal, so the reader sympathises with them. The greater the level of sympathy and empathy, the better. 
10. Find an idiom, such as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ and write a fable to explain the ‘origin’ of the phrase.

If you enjoyed this post, then you should probably check out the Novel Factory. 

If you already know all about nanorimo and are lookingfor a guide to success, then you might be interested in this article.

Let’s start at the beginning – what is nanowrimo?

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. These days, the ‘national’ bit is a bit defunct, as it’s really an international endeavour. There is an official organisation that run it and they have a website, which you can easily find by Googling ‘nanowrimo’.

However, there’s nothing to say that you actually have to sign up to the website to take part, you can do so completely in the privacy of your own computer.

The basic principle is that you write the first draft of a novel – all within the month of November. You are not allowed to have written any of it in advance (although it’s is highly recommended to have a plan sketched out – The Novel Factory software is perfect for this) and you have to write 50,000 words. That works out at just under 2000 words per day (they didn’t even have the good grace to pick a month with one extra day – still, I suppose it could have been February).

The advantage of ‘officially’ signing up and submitting your work to the Nanowrimo community, is that you may get more motivation by seeing what other people are doing, and getting instant feedback. Also, I think you get a kind of digital certificate if you complete it – if you’re into that kind of thing.

However, the slight risk is that some places are  funny about work that has been published anywhere else, including on a website – so that’s just something to keep in mind if you’re intending to take the work further.

What nanowrimo is

The point of nanowrimo is to get writing.

The main problem for most people that want to be writers is that they don’t get their bum on the seat and the words coming out. This may be an issue of finding the time (saying you don’t have time is not a reason, it’s an excuse, and if you don’t like me saying that, then you won’t like me saying this either – if ‘no time’ is your excuse, then you’re not a writer, and probably never will be), feeling uncertain or embarrassed, not knowing where to start, or being precious about the work.

Nanowrimo is a great way to get over some of those obstacles. There is no time to overplan, procrastinate or be precious. Just dump any old rubbish on the page. Writing crap is a necessary part of the process on the way to writing something decent, and Nanowrimo shoves you out onto the path.

Knowing that thousands of other people are doing it at the same time is also highly motivational.

What Nanowrimo isn’t

I am always very careful to say that Nanowrimo is about writing a ‘first draft’ not about writing a ‘novel’. That’s because a first draft is so far from a finished novel, they barely look related. There is no way you can get a finished novel out in one month, and a good rule of thumb is that however long the first draft took – refining it into something even barely passable will take about twice as long again. At the very least.

Anecdotally, publishers and literary agents groan when it comes round to Nanowrimo time, because in the following months, they are inundated with rubbish first drafts that are being called submission ready manuscripts (as a side note, this is useful to know for choosing when to submit your novel – i.e. not in December).

Using the nanowrimo concept to suit you

There is no law to say that you can’t apply the principle of having a fairly hefty challenge to suit your needs, if writing a first draft doesn’t happen to be the thing for you.

For example, if you already have a first draft, you could use the month to force yourself to get the second draft completed – although this is a lot harder to judge – 50,000 words is a very clear goal that can be broken down into discrete parts. But having said that, you could break down a second draft into two chapters per week, for example.

Another alternative works for short story writers, which is to write 30 stories in 30 days. You don’t have to write one a day, exactly, but it gives you a very clear guide as to whether you’re ahead or behind and the average rate you have to keep up.

All good novels contain a few important building blocks, so it’s a good idea to make sure your novel has all of them.

The major story elements that you really need to get a grip on from before you write the first sentence are:

•       Character
•       Situation
•       Objective
•   Opponent
•     Disaster

Now let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.

Character

Most novels start with an idea of a main character, or protagonist. You can have more than one major character, but you should try to be clear who your main protagonist is. They must be someone who can take action and who we follow the progress of in a linear fashion, even if they aren’t in every scene. They should develop in some way, emotionally, spiritually or morally.

Situation

Your story can’t take place in a void – or if it does, then I guess your situation is ‘being in a void’. The situation includes the location, time period and other aspects like technological level, culture, important historical factors, etc.

Objective

Your main characters has to have a goal. A lot of new writers miss this point, and don’t know why their writing fails to be compelling. Your protagonist will have small scene goals to keep the story trotting along, but they should also have an over-arching story-goal, something major. They don’t necessarily have to achieve this goal at the end, but they have to really want it – as if their life depended on it – which it often will.

Opponent

Hero walks up to stone, pulls out sword, becomes King. The end. Doesn’t make for much of a yarn, does it? That’s why you need opponents, to cause conflict, to give your hero something to strive against and to give your reader the reason to keep reading. Opponents can be baddies, armies, movie executives, nasty bosses, aliens, the police, forces of nature, or even parents. Anything that can get in the protagonist’s way.

Disaster

Throughout your story the stakes and tension should be increasingly rising, with each situation more terrible then the last, and you want to end with a huge bang, not with a whimper. So your story must have a disaster to end with. It may have explosions, shooting, crowds, shouting, car speeding to get to the airport before it’s too late… it really depends on the kind of story you’re writing. But it had better be BIG and EXCITING.

Summary

Does your story have all of the major story elements? If not, it might be worth having a think about those that are missing and seeing how they will enhance and improve your novel.

If you enjoyed this article, you might want to check out our novel writing software. Designed by writers for writers. 

Getting Started Writing a Novel

Our completely unscientific poll suggests that getting started is one of the biggest obstacles for novel writers (of course, there’s a bias towards procrastinators who are reading blogs about writing and completing polls rather than getting on with it, but we’ll gloss over that for now).

Now, ‘getting started’ could mean one of two things (or possibly others we haven’t thought of). It could be about getting the idea in the first place, it could be about getting a first draft out once you know what you want to write about.

Our experience is that most writers are bubbling over with ideas that are just dying to get out, so coming up with an idea in the first place is not usually a problem. However, if it is, then there are a few methods you can use to come up with your kernel, which can be expended into a premise and eventually  a first draft.

Ways to find inspiration for your novel:

One is to ‘fill out the boxes’ in our premise, including the major story elements of: character, situation, objective, opponent and disaster. If you think this might be for you, read the full article here.

Another is to look for inspiration in the world around you. This could be anything from reading the newspapers (and not just doing the Sudoku), people watching, reading movie synopses or watching real life documentaries. You can read more about these methods here.

Ways to get the first draft out

We’re kind of big on planning and using techniques to make something really difficult (writing a novel) a bit less difficult. To this end, we think the best way to get to a first draft is to work up to it bit by bit, starting with a premise, expanding that into an outline, threading in some  detail and ending up with quite a clear structure. Once you’ve got this structure, the first draft just flies out as all you have to worry about is prose.

We've written software to walk you through every stage of a novel,  planning and further.

However, if you don’t like to plan everything through first, that’s fine too. In that case there are a few things you can do to get started, from starting a few chapters in (often the pressure of writing the first line can be paralysing), visualising the scene in your mind and then describing it or thinking about to simply refusing to allow yourself to get up until you’ve written the first five hundred words. If you're really having trouble with your first draft, perhaps you should consider going the planning route...

 

In either case, the most important advice in our opinion is to make sure you don't get hung up on
details in the first draft - just thrash it out, however awful you think it is at the time. It’s never going to be perfect first time, it’s going to be rough and ready and it’s going to need a great deal of polishing, so don’t get hung up on this adjective or that order. Just get it out!

I have heard rumours that there are people who write their novel from start to finish, without even knowing how it's going to end - though I must say, I've never seen any hard evidence of this.

I've also met people who say constantly rewriting is a waste of time, and that you should consider every word carefully the first time you put it down. Admittedly, these are the kind of people who follow recipes to the letter, while I take instructions and quantities as more of a... suggestion.

However, the majority of quotes I've heard from successful, published quthors, suggest that nobody gets it right first time, and coming up with a decent novel requires drafting and redrafting.

I can't speak for anyone else's working process, but I'm going to set down here the process I've developed over the years, which I've found gives me the most benefits.

These include: pretty much eliminating writers block, increased effiency, being able to knock out a draft in a fraction of the time it took me before, and a more consistent, solid story.

The Novel Factory guides you through the planning steps

Planning

I'm not going to go into detail about planning here, because frankly, I could write a whole blog about it (and hey, look at that - I am!). But I do want it to have a clear position, because planning has to have been done (in my opinion), before you can get to blocking. If you say 'pah' to planning and want to get straight into thrashing out words, then so be it - but don't say I didn't warn you. If you want to know more about planning a novel, then you can read about my novel writing roadmap, or even better, check out the software that takes you through each step of writing a novel.

Blocking

This is a sort of pre-first draft stage, which I find invaluable. Following the loose notes I have for the plot, I go through and loosely write out what is going to happen in each scene. I often do it in the present tense, which also helps make it clear that I'm not writing prose (cue heated debate about writing in the present tense). It looks a bit like this:

Bob comes into the room and finds Joe there, who is acting suspiciously. They have a conversation about where Joe was last night and Bob drops into conversation that Sarah didn't answer her phone.

Bob paces around the room angrily, and Joe eventually storms out, saying he's never done anything wrong, and it's Bob who's the bad friend.

Bob throws some stuff around, then finally settles into the armchair with a glass of whiskey. He rolls the whiskey round and thinks about things. Could he have been wrong? Maybe Sarah really did run out of battery...

Etc etc.

You can notice a few things about this.

Firstly, I break the cardinal rule by telling, instead of showing. That's because it's blocking, not prose. I just want to sort out stage directions and roughly what's said. I'm not slowing myself down by thinking about making sure it comes across in a good way.

Secondly, I don't write the actual dialogue. If I had a particularly witty line that I just knew would have to be in, then I would note it, but generally I avoid going into actual dialogue, because if you do that then before long, you find yourself writing in too much detail (writing prose, basically), and then you'll get tied up before the blocking is finished.

As I'm doing my blocking, plot holes and snags come up, and I'm able to go back and make changes without having wasted hours, days or weeks, polishing a particular scene which then has to be hacked about or even completely cut.

Once  you have steamed through the blocking and you have a strong scaffold with all the biggest problems noticed and fixed, you can move onto the first draft.

The First Draft

This awesome writing programme shows you all your plot & structure notes

I used to hate writing the first draft. That's because my planning was poor and I hadn't done blocking, so I'd find myself constantly going back and having to change huge chunks of prose that I'd lovingly crafted. Also, I'd spend hours staring at the blank screen trying to think of what to do next, and trying to keep all the story elements straight in my head so I didn't mess anything up, all while simultaneously trying to think of a killer metaphor. It's enough to make your head explode.

Not anymore. Now the first draft flies out of my fingers, and I can usually get a 40,000 word first draft knocked out in a couple of months (versus a year and a half for my first novel).

That's because all my blocking is there to tell me what's happening next, so I can concentrate on immersing myself in the scene, visualising my characters in their locations, having their discussions, comfortable in the knowledge that the large scale things are taken care of.

The first draft is where I really start to write prose. I'm trying to write as if that's what the readers will be reading.

However, at this stage, I still try not to obsess too much about the exact details, such as balance of action and description, action > reaction (see below), or getting descriptions perfect. I do try to show not tell, and avoid adverbs, but I don't freak out about it.

As with the blocking, I do my best to force myself to get all the way to the end, rather than becoming distracted with polishing a particular scene or conversation.

The Second Draft

The Novel Factory keeps track of novel drafts - and it's free to try!

The second draft is an interesting time because you have so much material to work with, and it's so satisfying to rewrite, cut it up, cut bits out, rearrange sentences, swap paragraphs, and generally hone and polish. I would say that at the second draft I probably rewrite almost every single word, but it doesn't feel like it.

This is where I really start to feel I'm getting towards a finished product (I'm not, it's still miles off, but I like to fool myself).

Now is the time to obsess about completely eliminating anything that's not perfect. Doesn't add to plot, atmosphere or character development? Cut it. Description a bit waffly? Compress it. Sentence clunky? Restructure it. Every word should be perfect.

A major technique I use at this stage is checking the action > reaction cycle in the small scale prose. Basically, this boils down to making sure every two paragraphs follow this structure:

Paragraph One: External, impersonal description of the facts. E.g. Boris pulled a gun from his jacket.

Paragraph Two: Internal reactions, going through: feeling, reaction, thought. E.g. Samantha's heart started beating in double time. She reached for her own gun, thinking: Not this time, sucker.

I'll go into the action > reaction cycle in more detail in another post, but if there's a secret to writing great prose that yomps along and just feels, right,the action > reaction cycle is it.

The Third Draft

Depending on how well you did your second draft, and how fussy you are, your third draft may be a similar process to the second draft, or it may be more of minor exercise, tweaking a word here and there, but no major changes.

Around this time it's really useful to get a second opinion from someone who can read it afresh and give you a sense of what works and what doesn't. Obviously, you have to use what's available to you, but personally I highly recommend using a local, face to face writing group for this, as family and friends generally don't offer the kind of feedback you need, for various reasons, and online feedback also has its limits.

Polishing into Eternity

The advice before you attempt to submit your work to agents, is that you should make sure it's absolutely the best it can be. I understand that they receive a baffling number of half cut, lazy manuscripts - with hopeful, but hopeless wannabe authors expecting the agent to edit it for them - and they want to avoid that.

But the question of when a novel is the best it can be is an impossible one. Of course, you can always, always, make improvements. But that is the road to insanity. So, at some point you simply have to put down your pen and call it finished. At least until it's A) been rejected by at least twenty agents / publishers and B) You've finished your next novel.

Good luck, and comments on how other people find the drafting process and what you think about my process are very welcome!

And in case you haven't noticed, if you find this or any of my other posts useful, I'd highly recommend having a free trial of the Novel Factory, a creative writing programme by writers, for writers.

The opening of a novel is probably the hardest part - I know it certainly is for me.

Why? Well, read on...

Too much pressure!

The opening lines and chapters of your book have the most pressure heaped on them to be outstanding. This is because if they're not, nobody is ever going to see the rest. Literary agents rarely want more than the first few chapters, and anecdotal evidence says they often won't read past the first few sentences if they're not immediately gripped. So the beginning of the novel absolutely has to be mind-blowing, or you've wasted the last six months, year, decade.

Not warmed up yet

A lot of people take a bit of time to warm up, to get into the flow of things so their prose comes naturally, and skips along at a good pace. Often, the first few pages of writing are clunky, or even rambling. Once the writer finds their mojo though, the words fly from their fingers and onto the page, snappy dialogue, gripping action, all the good stuff.

Wanting to set the scene with too much backstory

A lot of new writers feel that they need to firmly set the scene at the beginning of a book, to let their readers know what's going on and make sure they're aware of the important plot points, where the story is going and why the lead character is acting how they are. Unfortunately, this usually has the effect of making the introduction feel like tedious exposition, where readers would rather get straight into the action.

So what can you do about it?

Start before the start

By this, I mean once you've decided where your story is going to begin, actually start writing from a scene or two earlier than that. These scenes will be cut in the end, but you will write them with full commitment as if they were staying.

By doing this, you can help avoid two of the problems described above.

Firstly, it will give you a chance to warm up and get into the flow of things.

Secondly, you will do all the exposition and backstory that your readers don't need (because they will pick everything up from context anyway, as long as your story telling is good enough).

What about reducing pressure?

Ah, yes. We haven't come up with a solution to that one yet - if anybody has any ideas - please let us know!

Before actually getting down to your first draft, it can be very valuable to prepare a rough outline.

This blocks out the scene from beginning to end, including where any important plot points come up, and roughly what people say, where they’re standing (or sitting or lying), gestures and important points regarding the location.

It should not be written in a prose form, and don’t worry about how rough and riddled with repetitive phrases or clichés it is, we’ll tidy all that up in our drafts.

At this point, keep referring to your notes on characters, locations and plot points to make sure everything is woven in, however bluntly.

Read about out lining a novel or  blocking in more detail here.

Or read about the principles behind our novel writing software (which incorporates a step by step guide to writing a novel).

Goodness, I'm exhausted just writing about it - you've done so well to get this far. Now it's time to get really stuck in. That's right. It's time for step 12 - to write your first draft.