Most novel writers tend to belong to one of two camps: those who plan and those who don't. Both categories boast names of bestselling authors, and both methods have their fortes as well as weaknesses. Let's join the camp of planners for a while and look at a few simple work strategies you might want to use in your future work even if you don't intend to plan every move of your characters beforehand.
One of the biggest challenges NaNoWriMo participants face is that they have to think quickly, jotting down the minimum of 1667 words every day – the size of an average novel scene. Without previous planning, this quick thinking may backfire, causing distractions (And what if my hero meets an elven queen? Yeah, I know it's not in the story, but...) and deviations from the original story idea.
The Structure of a Novel: Your Protagonist is the Reason for Your Book to be Written
What is a novel? – It's a story of a person who changes. Its genre, setting and theme all stem from the nature of your protagonist and how you want him or her to change by the end of the book.Your protagonist may be a sweet Southern belle becoming a tough streetwise woman. Or a homeless boy becoming a space captain. Every novel is a sequence of events that challenge and change its hero/ine. So the first thing you need to do when planning a novel, is to decide what kind of person your protagonist is and how you want her or him to change.
This process is called a character arc. Your book will take your protagonist from A – the story's first pages when your hero first faces the problem that's about to affect his entire life -- to B: the story ending by which the hero has transformed into a different person in order to solve his problems. Scrooge becomes generous and kind as the result of his experiences. Martin Eden becomes a famous writer as a result of his attempts to get published, but he grows bitter and disillusioned in the process, so his suicide in the end is a natural consequence of the character changes the book's events have inflicted on him.
Novel Theme: Your Protagonist's Driving Force
Once you've decided on who you want to see as your novel's protagonist and what kind of person s/he becomes by the end, the next step is to decide on the book's theme. This is very simple: your hero's biggest inner problem, something s/he's striving to achieve, is your novel's theme. The easiest example here is a romance, a love story (sorry, guys). A romance heroine has only one problem and one goal: to find love and overcome all hardships in order to reunite with the man she loves. Therefore, a standard romance novel theme is nearly always "Love conquers all".
If your hero is the aforementioned space captain, his story problem may be, for instance, having to confront corrupted alien officials, even if it puts his life and military career in jeopardy. The book's theme in this case would be, "Honor above all".
In both cases, the theme will decide what kind of events you need to make up in order to challenge and change the hero. Would corrupted alien officials try to kill the romance heroine? I don't think so: her story goal is to find love, not to defend her military honor. And even if the space captain happens to fall in love, his love subplot will still have to support the novel's honor theme: you might have to make him, at a certain point, choose honor over love (as the novel's theme suggests).
When writing a novel, you need to come up with appropriate situations that would explore the book's theme from different angles. Some characters will support the theme (like the romance heroine's best friend who might decide not to divorce her husband). Others, on the contrary, will show to the reader the consequences of a bad decision (so you might give the romance heroine a brother who dumped his girlfriend and married into money only to regret it by the end of the book).
Additional reading:
How to Write a NaNoWriMo Novel: POV and Viewpoint Characters
Crawford Killian: Advice on Novel Writing (last accessed Oct 23 2010)
Randy Ingermanson: How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method (last accessed Oct 23 2010)
Irene Woodhead - Irene Woodhead is a bilingual English/Russian freelance writer and translator. After years of working as a professional opera/jazz singer, ...
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