The Physical Steps To Writing Your Book
Many how-to write books explain what words to use and even discuss your equipment and other unimportant things, but they never tell you the exact steps you must take to write your novel.
Maximize Your Writing Time
I’m giving you these steps so you can maximize your time while writing. All I did to get these steps was examine my best writing sessions (where I was in the flow, generating solid draft and writing felt enjoyable).
Best Practices
Just like athletes or engineers, writers have some things that help them get everything set up properly (especially their minds) so they can maximize performance. That’s what we want. We want to set ourselves up so we can perform at our highest level.
The Steps: Do Not Ignore These
That heading sounds a bit forceful, but here is my point: This is how actual Creative Fiction Writing gets done.
If you don’t want to waste all the time you’re supposed to be writing then please consider each one of these steps and just try them for five writing sessions. If you really don’t find they take you to the next level of writing you can quit following them.
- When you sit down for a Writing Session you must not allow yourself to do anything except write the story you’re working on.
- This means you don’t think about anything except the story you’re working on
- This first rule is the most important rule - it is discipline for your mind that will allow you to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do: Write Your Novel
- Yes, I’m saying don’t even look up a word definition or fact while you’re doing your scene / chapter writing. You have to be very careful because “looking up the definition of a word” can be the exact distraction that starts you down a path of reading stuff on the Internet / Social Media and then very quickly you are no longer writing your novel.
Immediately, the question arises: How do you “only write the scene”? That leads us to the second step of our Best Practices.
- Before writing anything, you must see the action taking place on the Movie-Screen of your mind.
Seeing The Action on the Movie-Screen of Your Mind
What does that mean? It means that you imagine your character(s), the setting and exactly what is happening as if you are watching it happen on a movie screen. Think about when you watch a scene in a movie, you cannot see all the internalization that goes on in a character, but you somehow know what they’re feeling. You must show action in your scenes / chapters like that.
Why?
This is the same way that real life works. You see an event happen and people react and even though you don’t know what their internalizations are, you know basically how they’re feeling (scared, upset, angry, happy, etc.)
Key To Writing All Fiction
Using the movie-screen of your mind is the key to writing all fiction. Most authors don’t even know they’re doing this, but the best ones are. When you read the best writing the words transform from just words on the paper to images inside your head. But, how do authors do that? They’ve used the movie-screen of the mind method.
Here’s why it works.
If I say to you, “quick, write a scene.” You should respond with something like “What are talking about? What kind of scene? What is happening? Who is in the scene?”
You see? You already know that you need some facts so you can write a scene. You wouldn’t accept someone saying something so abstract to you and you shouldn’t expect it will work when you do it to yourself either.
There’s actually another step to writing that must be done. You must imagine the scene playing out before you so you can write it down.
How Real Life Proves This Is True
Suppose instead of saying, “quick, write a scene,” I say to you, “Look at what is happening down the street and tell me about it.” You look down the street and see a red Corvette racing toward a man who is standing in the middle of the street shaking his fist. At the last moment the car swerves and the man leaps out of the way. The car slides and the driver loses control of the car and careens into a tree.
You see? You saw. You wrote. It’s all very easy.
To write fiction, you must “see it happening” as clearly as if you looked out the window and saw the car racing toward the man. There is no other way. Oh, well, there is another way. You can not imagine the scene and then sit there writing a bunch of boring facts and non-story information that no one (including yourself) ever wants to read. But, there is no other way that leads to writing good solid novel draft.
This All Adds Up With the NovelTest Method
It all adds up because now, every time you begin a writing session you must already have the basic details of the scene / chapter that you are writing during the session. If you do not, then do not begin a writing session.
To Write, You Must Have a Basic Idea
You must already have a very basic idea of what the scene / chapter will show. This is where the steps of creating the basic chapter outline of your novel becomes so important. That’s because the third step here is to form a basic sentence which allows you to begin to see the sceen play out on the movie-screen of your mind.
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Form the basic sentence which describes the event or action or conflict that will occur in the scene.
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Sit for a few moments while you see your main character or character taking some action related to your scene idea. Let it play out in your mind. Make the character act it out and think about what she is thinking as she takes action.
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Finally, write down what you see
For now, this is enough. We’ll talk more about how we’ll follow these steps, in upcoming articles.
Your Task: Try Five Writing Sessions
Here are the over all steps to writing your novel:
- Create your NovelTest Outline
- Set up five sessions when you will not do anything except write one scene / chapter. Put these on your schedule. Schedule them for the times of week and day that will work perfectly for you.
- Examine your work habits - Are you keeping your schedule? Are you writing during those sessions?
More to come.
