3 Tools for Drafting Your Book
Most of my clients have hired me because they have a book idea but they don't know how to bring it to completion.
Anne Lamott says that the secret to being productive is to plunk your butt in the chair. But if you don't have a plan, discipline alone won't accomplish much.
James Patterson recommends extremely detailed outlines. But if you know exactly how a story will go before you write it, you won't discover anything along the way, and neither will your reader.
The best approach is to begin with a problem that you care urgently about but don't yet know how you'll resolve. Think of this like scaling a peak. You either will or you won't, but you won't know the outcome until you try.
Once you have a problem with clear stakes, identify a point in your narrative where that problem will need to be resolved one way or another. This might be a scene where all the major characters will gather or a place where a moment of reckoning will occur. But you're not sure, until you get there, how it will unfold. This is your summit. You can see it up there above you. It's your goal. But you still have to figure out each handhold and foothold along the way.
Then you want to identify a few smaller turning points for the middle. I think of these as landmarks that help you stay on track. Instead of climbing straight to the summit, you climb to this landmark, get your bearings, then climb to the next.
I wrote a novel in two months using this method. You can read more about my process in the link I'll share in the comments. But I needed something like a mountaineer's map: just enough of the route to stay on track, but lots of room for creativity between each major landmark. That made me eager to plunk my butt in the chair every day, because I brought a mixture of confidence and curiosity.
If your own book project has stalled, I'd love to hear more about where you got stuck. Or if you use a different planning method, please tell me about it in the comments!
No matter what tools we use, we come of age as writers when we make those tools our own.
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