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So, let’s get right down to business. I want to write my first novel. Have you written anything else? A short story, anything? Jumping into a novel before anything else is really putting the cart before the horse. You need to get your fundamentals down before hitting the rather difficult task of writing a first novel. To use an analogy, it's like trying to cook a croquembouche when you haven't even made scrambled eggs yet. • What did you do to begin your writing process? Writing to just write doesn’t work for me, because I need to world build, character build everything. Okay, first thing before you do anything is to have an idea of what is going to happen in your story. You need an idea of where the story is going, so even a vague outline should be a start. It's no good building around it if there is nothing to build around. As to characters or world first - that is your call. Some find they create the characters and the world comes around that (Rick Riordan), others create a world and then populate it (JRR Tolkien). Both work, it depends on how your mind best fills in the details. • How did you start your draft? What tools helped you? Should I have an idea of what my characters will look like before writing? As far as world building, what helped you provide a fully fleshed out world? If you are a planner, as it sounds like you are, then, yes, you need characters and world fleshed out before starting the draft, as well as an outline of the story with all beats, twists, etc. included. Nowadays, many people have pictures of their characters there before they start writing; in the old days character sheets (think AD&D 1st edition) were the go-to. And as much of the world needs to be fleshed out as you are going to use in your story. Remember, you do not need to include everything from your world-building, but having it all there wil help you be consistent. To flesh out a world, what has helped me is utilising a knowledge of geology so that I could create landmasses that made sense and ecosystems that would fit in the world. I have a background in science, so that did help. • I have a huge problem with showing vs telling, how did you overcome that? Two things: read lots of good authors to see how they do it and practice. There are plenty of online courses - I believe WdC offers one - innvolving how to show not tell. I started to work hard on that some 30+ years ago and even with 6 trad published books (and more than 80 trad published short stories) under my belt, I still slip up on occasion. So it's all practice, practice, practice. |
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