How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

psyche.co

How to plan your novel | Psyche

Guides
by Jason Whittaker
16-20 minutos

Need to know

In his memoir On Writing (2010), Stephen King

observes: ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two
things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s
no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no
shortcut.’ King’s advice is about developing the habit of
being a writer: writing every day will turn you into a
writer. But in order to be a novelist, you need to know
more than this, such as how to create compelling
characters and structure your plot.

In my experience, two factors tend to hold back writers

from completing their novel. The first is that, as King
says, writing isn’t yet a habit: because we all have to
write at some point (even if it’s no more than a text or

1 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

social media post about our day), there is an assumption

that knocking out 80,000 words or so is just like our
regular writing activities – just more so. It is not. In this
guide, I’ll show you some of the extra things you need to
take into account when planning your book.

The second factor is confidence. This is usually a lack of

confidence, but occasionally an excess of it as well: one
phenomenon among would-be writers is that talking
about a project can give as much satisfaction as actually
doing it. The book is written in their head without the
need to commit a single word to the page. More often,
however, authors lack confidence, and worry about
whether they are doing things ‘right’, which is why I’ll
cover the essentials here to get you started.

The most important point to start from is that while there

are a number of things you should consider when
planning your book – such as characterisation, plotting
or the style and voice of your work – there is no single
golden rule for how to write a novel. Some authors will
sit down in their study – or even hire an office where
they go to work every day – and work 9 to 5, while
others will grab an hour or two at the end of the day after
the children have gone to bed. Some writers like to plot
out every event meticulously before they begin the first

2 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

sentence; others get bored if they know everything in

advance, and instead treat fiction as a kind of
experiment to see how characters will react. However,
while every author will write a novel differently, there are
some common themes that occur again and again.

What to do

Even for those who launch straight into a novel,

ploughing through a first draft in an attempt to ‘get
something down’, these are the four main factors you
need to consider for your major project: character, plot,
place, and voice or style. While I am distinguishing the
four essential elements of a novel that you need to
consider when planning, it is important that these are
developed together in parallel.

What’s more, you’ll need to find the ways to cultivate

your own writing habits – the times and places you work
best, whether you’re a morning writer or an evening one,
or the kind of person who needs absolute quiet or
background activity.

1. Character: The first step to consider is who your

characters are going to be. For many people setting out
to write for the first time, this might feel counterintuitive.
After all, the plot or narrative is what many people talk

3 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

about when they want to indicate that a book is

compelling. Yet we care about a story only when it
affects characters that touch us deeply in some way.
Readers might have only a vague sense of some of the
events that happen in Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations (1861) but, once read, figures such as Pip,
Miss Havisham and Magwitch are rarely forgotten.
Likewise, when we follow Lyra through Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000), Atticus Finch in
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), or Holly
Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1958), we are drawn into the storytelling because these
are people we care about.

The British novelist Ross Raisin describes characters as

‘the lifeblood of fiction’, and observes that because they
are the story, they need to be as unique as the work of
fiction they inhabit. We want to believe in such people,
no matter how fantastical they appear. To make them
compelling, you will need to work out what your main
character desires – what they want, how are they
frustrated (because without this there is no drama) and
how they will change to get what they need, which is not
always the same as what they want.

2. Plot: If characters are the essential components of a

4 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

novel, then the events that happen to them form the plot.
As we have already seen, knowing all aspects of the plot
is not necessary when you begin to write, but in practice
most authors will want to have some sense of the
overarching structure of their plot. Indeed, so important
can plotting be that I’ll cover this in more detail in the
‘Learn more’ section.

Although it is by no means an absolute requirement, a

useful technique for beginning to plan your novel is to
distinguish between the story (the series of events that
occur in a chronological fashion) and the narrative (how
that story is told). In a thriller such as Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon (1981), the chronological story is the events
that lead to the transformation of Francis Dolarhyde into
the serial killer ‘The Tooth Fairy’, but the novel’s
narrative tells much of this in flashback. A story’s
beginning can be quite tedious, so narratives tend to
start in the middle of things: launching into a story nearer
to the climactic action gives us an impetus to care about
the characters.

High modernist and postmodernist fiction often eschews

conventional narrative structure, but the majority of
writers tend to use a variant of what’s known as the
three-act or five-act structure. In the simplest of these,

5 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

the story breaks down into the setup, the confrontation

and resolution. This is extremely popular with
blockbuster formats such as Star Wars or Die Hard,
where the protagonist is introduced, faces potentially
disastrous complications, but comes through at the end.
The five-act structure – beloved by William Shakespeare
and many writers since – complicates the simpler
version by following the initial exposition with rising
action or conflict, the climax, a period of falling action
and the dénouement which resolves the action at the
end. This is now the standard format for many plots. For
additional help on narrative structures, see the blog by
the British writer John Yorke, who focuses in particular
on how inciting incidents lead to a journey, during which
the hero experiences a crisis and climax before the story
is resolved.

3. Place: The events of your novel need to take place in

a particular location. When it comes to worldbuilding, as
this part of the process gets called, the assumption is
often that writing about what you know will be easier
than creating something entirely from scratch. In fact,
over many years working with creative writers, I’ve
discovered that they can find it more difficult to see
familiar locations with fresh eyes in order to make them

6 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

vivid.

Worldbuilding often comes into its own – indeed,

overtakes all other aspects of fiction writing – with
science fiction and fantasy. J R R Tolkien invented
complete languages and complex histories for the races
of Middle Earth, and much of this wasn’t intended for
publication but instead to ground his own vision of this
alternative reality. Likewise, any form of historical fiction
can involve considerable amounts of research to flesh
out the place for a reader.

A sense of place can be immensely important to the

development of a character, and two simple tricks will
help you establish this. First, describe a location where
your protagonist spends a great deal of time. List 10
things in the room where they sleep, for example, and
one thing that the character wishes to keep hidden (such
as a photograph or childhood toy) – this can help to
describe their motivation. Second, sketch out the furthest
location that they will travel to in the story: this might be
a far-flung planet or it could be the next village across a
valley, but in both cases it will help to establish the scale
of the world in which these fictional characters live.

4. Voice and style: A writer’s style is very often the

component that brings a novel to life, and provides it with

7 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

its unique DNA. The cerebral voice of David Foster

Wallace, for example, is a world apart from the tough-
talking erudition of Raymond Chandler’s characters or
the gleeful spikiness of Angela Carter. Sometimes, a
particular voice gives rise to an entire work of fiction:
Gail Honeyman began writing her bestselling novel
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) to capture
the voice of an isolated woman who began speaking to
her after reading an article.

The factors that go into creating a writer’s style are

manifold, but I’ll highlight a few of them here. First, is the
voice of the narrator distinctive – a separate character in
the novel, such as Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in
the Rye (1951) or the three women who recount the
events of The Girl on the Train (2016)? This decision
often leads to the second immediate choice for a
novelist, concerning whether the narrator is unreliable –
such as the split protagonist in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight
Club (1996).

Third, authors must choose the point of view from which

the story will be told. First-person point of view limits the
text to the thoughts and experiences of the narrator,
typically a distinct character in the novel. Third-person is
more flexible, and can be omniscient – knowing

8 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

everything in the story – or close, as though following

around one person with a camera to view everything
through their perspective. Omniscient third-person was
very popular in 19th-century novels, whereby the
narrator had access to the thoughts and feelings of all
the characters. During the 20th century, however, close
third-person has become much more popular, limiting
the perspective to one person at a time, allowing
information to be hidden and revealed more slowly to the
reader.

Although you need to make some decisions early on,

such as the point of view and who the narrator will be, be
prepared for many elements of your own style to emerge
through the actual process of writing. As you progress
with your novel, make sure the voice and style are
consistent and coherent throughout.

Key points

Work out your writing schedule and try to stick to it: this
can’t remain the same every day or every week, but if
you know that you work better at certain times or in
certain places, you’re more likely to complete a project.

More than anything, a successful novel is about

characterisation: try making some notes about who your

9 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

main characters are, what motivates them, and what

challenges lie ahead of them.

Sometimes, advice on plotting can become very

complex, but bear in mind these five points and you are
more likely to stay on track: what is the inciting incident
that starts the action? What journey does the protagonist
go on? What crisis do they experience? What is the
climax of the story? Finally, how is everything resolved?

Believable characters require a world in which readers

can immerse themselves. Whether it’s far-flung fantasy
or contemporary drama, you need a sense of place that
will bring the action to life.

There is no such thing as the correct style or voice, but

consistency (including such things as point of view or a
coherent use of language) will make your novel easier
both to write and to read. Experiment with different
tenses or points of view to see what makes your writing
more vivid.

Learn more

In 1928, the Russian folklorist and scholar Vladimir

Propp argued that there were only a few underlying
narratives that made up the majority of folk tales.

10 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

Analysing a large number of individual tales, he made

note of the different events that occurred, such as a
wizard giving a hero a potion to slip past the guards, or
an acrobat providing a talking eagle that can carry the
protagonist wherever they want to go. Based on this,
Propp suggested that there were 31 types of action
(‘narrative functions’) that could take place within a story,
such as the Departure, when the hero leaves to start his
quest, or the Task, where a difficult assignment is given.
He also found that there were seven types of character:
the hero, the villain, the donor, the helper, the princess
(or ‘sought-for person’), the despatcher, and the false
hero.

At first glance, Propp’s categorisation – written up in his

book Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) – might seem
extremely limiting, but he provided an important insight
into the notion of underlying narrative structures. The
idea is that there are fundamental patterns to
storytelling, or archetypes, that provide us with a deep
sense of fulfilment when we hear them repeated. Like
cadences in music (which often follow familiar
movements from one chord to another), these structures
bring with them that often-overused word, closure.

Trying to follow a formula too rigidly is likely to render the

11 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

plot of your novel stiff and uninspiring, but Yorke

provides a basic framework that will work for most
stories. First, there is the inciting incident: the ‘What will
happen?’ moment. We ask this question, for example,
when the corpse appears at the beginning of a crime
novel, instigating the search for the killer. After the plot
has been initiated, the protagonist will undergo some
kind of journey. In many cases, this is a literal quest, as
in Frodo’s travels to destroy the Ring but, more
importantly, it involves internal change on the part of the
main character, who should not be the same at the end
of the book as at the beginning. The crisis is the pivotal
point where the hero reaches rock bottom, where all
hope seems to be lost and the journey is in danger of
being abandoned. It is the moment when a character is
put most to the test. As observed by the Earl of Salisbury
in Shakespeare’s Henry V the night before the battle of
Agincourt, it is the moment of the most ‘fearful odds’.

The crisis is followed by the climax, the final moment,

which might indeed be a literal fight between protagonist
and antagonist, hero and villain. As Yorke observes, if
the inciting incident asks, ‘What will happen?’, the climax
answers: ‘This.’ Finally, the resolution brings about a
sense of closure. Sometimes there are rewards for good

12 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

behaviour; sometimes, as with tragedies, the tying up of

loose ends provides anything but a happy ending.

Yorke describes these elements of a narrative as the

‘building blocks’ that form the ‘primary colours’ of a story.
They are not there to be followed as a slavish formula,
but by asking yourself what the inciting incident of your
narrative is, what journey the protagonist undergoes,
how the crisis takes place and how that is different from
the climax, and how the story is to be resolved, you will
go a long way to satisfying the demands of your readers.

Of course, if you want to write literary fiction, you might

deliberately seek to subvert a lot of these building
blocks, but knowing how the general rules of narratives
work can make such subversion much more effective.
Indeed, if you want to be really playful with the rules, as
in reverse narratives such as Sarah Waters’s novel The
Night Watch (2006) or Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow
(1991), then plotting and planning the structure of your
narrative becomes more important than ever. This is why
engaging in some preparation for a novel becomes so
important: rather than just launching into writing and
seeing what emerges, knowing something about the
direction of the narrative and motivations of your
character will make for a more compelling final story.

13 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

Links & books

The John Yorke Story blog is a useful site for advice on

the craft of storytelling.

The National Centre for Writing has free resources for

aspiring writers, as well as events and courses.

There are many guides and memoirs by novelists on

their craft, and the following are some of the best
introductions to the art of writing a novel:

Margaret Atwood, On Writers and Writing (2015)

James Frey, How to Write Damn Good Fiction:

Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling (1994)

Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense

Fiction (1966)

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

Robert Cohen and Jay Parini (eds), The Writer’s Reader:

Vocation, Preparation, Creation (2017). This is an
anthology of essays about the art of writing by famous
authors, including Zadie Smith, Philip Roth, Virginia
Woolf and Henry James.

Ross Raisin, Read This if You Want to Be a Great Writer

(2018)

14 de 15 15/06/20 13:39
How to plan your novel | Psyche Guides about:reader?url=https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-plan-a-novel-...

Karen Stevens, Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the

Journey (2014)

John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why
We Tell Them (2013)

15 de 15 15/06/20 13:39