From Idea to Publication: The Journey of a Published Novel
Originally posted in 2020. Read PART ONE
Part Two: To Plan or Not To Plan
I am a planner. I always have been and always will be.
The careers I have chosen (or fallen into) are ones where planning is crucial. If I didn’t plan properly, it meant someone didn’t get paid or the organization lost more money than it made. Someone could miss a flight or not get picked up from the airport. Other bookings could cost money or be the cause of cancelling an event if I didn’t plan properly. Deadlines missed. Powers that be, left in the dark. I think you get the picture.
When it comes to writing, there are all kinds of ways to get a novel written. There are books about plotting, books about pantsing (aka “winging it”), and resources about plantsing (plotting and pantsing together). Really, whatever works for you is likely the best method.
So Many Resources to Choose From
At the time I started working through my idea of SNOWBOUND IN WINTERBERRY FALLS, I relied heavily on the resources I’d discovered through countless hours of reading writer forums, blogs and articles on the craft of writing. One resource that continually popped up was Gwen Hernandez’s ROMANCING THE BEAT. She was a romance editor at a time where the genre was really starting to take off and she’d noticed a pattern in the successful novels her imprint published (successful being high volume of sales). These books had what she broke down into “beats”. There are 25 of them. Yes. That many.
Another idea I’d come across was character sketches. Some authors suggest using a Faust questionnaire and I did – for this book anyway. It was a bit complicated at first and I felt really funny “interviewing my characters”, but you know what? A crucial piece of my story came from that “interview”. So I won’t knock it entirely, it’s just since then I’ve found another method I like better (check out Susan May Warren’s The Story Equation).
Having already written a two page outline of the general idea of my story, I set to work on the romance beats and filled in what I could. There were some left blank as I honestly had no idea what those beats would be. The beats with the character sketches combined gave me enough to go on to feel confident about starting my second manuscript. Once I had about half of the beats filled out, I opened a new Scrivener file and began typing.
CHAPTER ONE…
If you’re a writer, are you a plotter, pantser or plantser?