This book will help you get excited to plan your novel. The tools shared here are designed to spark your muse and give you confidence when you sit down to write your story. Plan Your Novel Like A Pro: And Have Fun Doing It! is for organic writers and pansters who want a roadmap to follow, so that they can let their creativity loose.“Beth’s book is like plotting for pantsers!”–Tess Rider, Science … pantsers!”–Tess Rider, Science Fantasy Romance Author
We know that you have other activities in your life besides writing, and that writing your novels is important to you. You can plan your novel in a way that fits into your life. We know, because we’ve done it, multiple times!
Based on the popular course, Plan Your Novel: 30-Day Writing Challenge, this book is organized into 4 sections, so that you can do the exercises over a one-month period.
If you’re planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) or Camp NaNo, this course will get you ready and give you everything you need to write a novel in 30 days.
This book is for you if you have never written a novel, have always wanted to, and still feel lost on how to go from brilliant idea to The End, then you will be stretched in new and different ways; or if you’re an experienced novelist, with 1 or 2 completed or partially completed novels under your bed, and you’re stuck somehow. You may find this course structured in a way that’s new to you and yet familiar; or if you have 3 or more unfinished novels sitting in a drawer, and always hit that sagging middle and lose focus or lose interest, this course will help you dream up exciting ways to torture, I mean challenge, your characters all the way to story resolution.
With this book, you’ll be able to believe that you can write a novel; step into a sense of satisfaction and creative accomplishment; cet excited for NaNoWriMo, and of course, plan your novel
If you want to write novels, novellas, and short stories — page-turning fiction like mystery, thriller, romance, suspense, fantasy, science fiction, women’s fiction, and mash-ups of these — for the Adult, Young Adult, New Adult, and Middle Grade Reader market.
Here is the list of chapters:
Introduction & Essential Tips
Chapter 1: Essential Character Tips for Fiction Writers
Chapter 2: Essential Plot Tips for Fiction Writers
Week One: Elevator Pitch, What-If Pitch & Short Synopsis
Chapter 3: Elevator Pitch
Chapter 4: The What-If Pitch by Ezra Barany
Chapter 5: Your Story Synopsis
Week Two: Get to Know Your Main Characters
Chapter 6: Interview Your Characters
Chapter 7: Uncover Your Characters’ Core Beliefs And Identity And How They Change
Chapter 8: Your Characters’ Secrets
Chapter 9: Draft Your Character’s Emotional Core With The Empathy Formula
Chapter 10: The Character Relationship Map
Chapter 11: Focusing on What to Write
Week Three: Story Plot Points & World Building
Chapter 12: Uncover Your Character’s Worst Fears to Discover Your Story Conflicts
Chapter 13: World Building: Questions to Brainstorm
Chapter 14: Your Story’s Structure
Chapter 15: The Question Toolbox
Week Four: Scene-By-Scene Outline And Plotting
Chapter 16. High-Concept Pitch
Chapter 17: Design Your Plot with the Problem-Solution Tool
Chapter 18: Five Essential Stages Of A Scene (And Of Story!)
Chapter 19: Scene Setup: Storyboarding
Chapter 20: Scene-by-Scene Outline
Next Steps: Write Your Novel
Resources for Further Reading and Study
more
Nicely Structured Way to Plan Your Novel
This book is written by a husband and wife who are both published authors. They have an online writing school as well. If you’ve considered writing a novel or have struggled to try to write one, this gentle but in-depth approach to planning could be helpful to you. The authors understand that the rest of us may have a hard time squeezing in planning and writing a novel into our lives when our full-time jobs aren’t writing. So this book allows you to plan your novel over four weeks, each week with a general theme: the novel overview, characters, the plot, and scene-by-scene planning. Within these weeks, the authors drill down into the topics, like the elevator pitch as a way of simplifying your story idea or crafting a character’s emotional core, describing each idea well and giving you one or more action steps that you can complete in 15 to 20 minutes as you plan your novel. The authors give examples from their own works as well as famous ones you’ve heard of, like Harry Potter. I thought the information they shared and the way they encouraged the writer was spot on; I think the action steps, if followed, could certainly take you from a vague idea for your novel to a very specific one that you could then write. The authors state that you could take more or less time planning, rather than follow their 4-week structure, but the idea of taking planning slowly helps you contemplate different possibilities in your mind and play with concepts before committing to them. Honestly, the only thing I didn’t like about this book is that it felt like it was a pitch at times for their online courses or other books. But other than that, I thought this was a helpful book for a new or stuck writer to plan the novel that they have been wanting to write.
I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
If you’ve tried plotting and it didn’t work for you, this book might help. It’s written by a husband wife team and it was interesting to me to see the male/female thinking differences. I definitely thought that was a strength of this book–if a point didn’t make sense to you the way Beth explained it, her husband Ezra comes at it from a different perspective, and you might have you “ah” moment then.
I’ve read a lot of plotting books and there wasn’t a huge amount of new information in this one. However, there were enough gems I either hadn’t heard before or hadn’t heard put in that context before to make it worthwhile for me. I’m drafting a new (romance) series and there were several places in this book where I highlighted. There were several more spots where I jotted down some ideas on my current story idea paper.
This book contains the best break-down of the romance plot that I’ve read. It’s simple, yet was different than any way anyone has explained it. I definitely had an “ah” moment.
In conclusion, I feel like this might not be an “essential” tool for any writer’s library, but it is definitely a great addition.
One issue that I almost knocked a star off for–there is a workbook mentioned. You have to click a link to get to it. There is also a “story spinner” referenced that you have to click to get. It’s a personal thing, but when I buy a book, I don’t want to have to click a link to get everything I need to go with the book.