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Starting Your Fiction Book
I’ll start off by saying that I have a minimalist style when it comes to starting and writing novels. This means I do not write outlines or detailed notes prior to beginning any novel. I may do those things later in the process, but I don’t do it when I’m staring at a blank page that says: Chapter 1. It also goes without saying that the fastest way to start a book is to start writing it.
I also think the fastest way to never start or finish your novel is to bog yourself down with detailed character biographies, notes and plot outlines. After all, you’re going to think you did an amazing amount of work if you wrote 50 pages of character biographies that included primary and secondary emotions, height, weight, tattoos and disabilities along with their back-stories, primary driving forces and personality traits. The truth is that you didn’t write a word of your novel, and I believe that in most instances, those descriptors and features will come out in the text as you write.
Read more: How to Quickly Start Your Next Fiction Book/Manuscript/Writing Project
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When you’re writing a new novel, you can choose to do all the writing, drafting, editing, proofreading, polishing and formatting yourself, or you can choose to work with an editor. What you decide will depend on your budget and whether or not you feel editing services are something you want to utilize.
1. The Developmental Edit
Developmental edits are designed to find large flaws in your manuscript. This is typically where the editor goes through and points out things that are missing and things are unclear. It could be description. It could be a dropped main plot of a dropped subplot or a scene, section or chapter that you forgot to finish. When it comes to developmental edits, you want to get them done fairly early in the process. I recommend no later than after draft three. At this stage, your plots and subplots should be in and any description you're going to add should also be in the manuscript. I recommend getting developmental edits done at drafts two and three because you should be about halfway finished with the writing process, but you shouldn’t be so far along that major changes really send you into a tailspin and delay the publication of your work. It’s worth noting that these are one of the most expensive types of edits, but they can save you months when they are performed correctly and utilized correctly.
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If you have two books that you want to release at roughly the same time or two book ideas, you may be tempted to write them at the same time. While there are some good reasons to do this, there are also some downsides. Read more to learn if working on two books at the same time would be right for you.
Pros of Working on Two Books at the Same Time
There are a couple very valid reasons for working on two books at the same time. The biggest reason is that you’ll be able to control your release dates. If you want to release a book every two or three months, you can do that once you have multiple books finished, assuming you are self-publishing.
Read more: Pros and Cons Of Working on 2 Books at the Same Time
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If you’re like every other writer I’ve met, you get random ideas for novels that you know would be great and well-received by readers, but it’s not always convenient to start working on a new novel, especially if you’re already working on a single title or the next book in your series. So, what’s the best way to handle all these ideas?
How to Get the Ideas Down so You Can Write Them Later
The biggest problem with being a very prolific author is the number of ideas that you may have for various novels. Thankfully, you can efficiently handle these ideas so that you can work on them after you finish your current manuscript.
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Have you heard of the term over-editing? If you’re a fiction or non-fiction author, you’ve probably run across this term more than once. It obviously means, you’d done too much editing on your current manuscript, but what is the definition of too much editing?
Over-Editing – A Definition
Over-editing occurs when the editing process fails to move the book forward or make the content of the book cleaner and/or more appealing to readers.
Read more: What Is Over-Editing, and What Can You Do About It?