BOOK PLANNING

You may have, at some point, found a book that was impossible to put down, making you read it from cover to cover in one sitting. If obligations interrupted a one-sitting reading, the book was probably on your mind throughout the day and, the second it was possible, you picked it up again to keep reading.

What was it about the book that kept you mesmerized within its pages? Was it the characters? Was it the setting of the book? Was it everything about the book that kept you turning the pages?

Anyone can write a book, but it takes a really good writer to snare an audience in such a way that they are willing to give up everything else – including sleep – to fall into the magic of your creation.

Authors who are considered best sellers do not just put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) without full planning of their book. Planning has to be done quite methodically from beginning to end, yet with an open enough mind to realize that, oftentimes, the characters within have a mind of their own. Of course, with practice, the process gets easier and these authors are able to produce one to two books per year. Quite an amazing feat, don’t you think?

You can, just as these authors, create a work of magic that will keep your readers enthralled and begging for more. Good planning is the key.

The start of this planning is your outline. Many writers feel that the outline is one of the most difficult parts of writing a novel, but it doesn’t need to be a daunting task. Possibly, it’s the word “outline” that is the problem as it doesn’t offer a familiar visual image. So, for the purpose of this course, let’s give it a familiar name instead. We’ll call it your “table of contents”.

In looking at any book, whether fiction or nonfiction, you can find a table of contents. It shares the title of each chapter and the page on which that chapter can be found. The title of this chapter (unless the author has chosen only to number the chapters) gives the reader a quick glimpse into what the chapter might be about.

You are going to use this table of contents to plan out your novel step-by-step using the novel idea you’ve chosen.

When working on your “table of contents” chapter by chapter, it is important to cover the following:

1)      Who

2)      What

3)      Where

4)      When

5)      Why

This is also where you must decide if a Prologue is necessary to tell your story. You may not recognize the word, but you’ve certainly seen a Prologue at work in many movies. It’s the introduction scene that doesn’t seem to make any sense at first, but as the movie continues on, suddenly it all comes into focus.

For instance, in the movie “Sleepy Hollow”, the first scene you see is a man in a powdered wig (sets the time period) riding in a stage coach (sets the time period) who suddenly realizes that the stage coach is moving quite erratically. He puts his head out the window to discover a headless man driving the stage coach, panics, and jumps from the coach. You then see him running into a cornfield (again, set the stage – we know he’s somewhere in the country) and coming upon a terrifying scarecrow with a pumpkin head. Suddenly, he turns around and you can hear a sword unsheathe, you see the look of horror on his face, and then his head is taken off. The next scene takes you to New York City in 1799. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be any relation between the two, but the prologue has given you an introduction as to what the movie will be about.

The prologue may introduce a character that won’t be an integral part of the book until later (even if only in memory) and/or a scene which is very important for readers to understand because it is what the whole book centers around. With certain books, if there is no prologue, the entire book would make absolutely no sense.

Not all books require a prologue, so you will have to decide if a prologue is absolutely necessary or if you can begin your book directly from chapter one allowing it to unfold chapter by chapter.

WHO: The “who” in your table of contents will consist of the characters that will be a part of the chapter. You needn’t give them personality as yet in your “table of contents”. Just knowing if they are man, woman, child or some other creature will suffice right now.

WHAT: The “what” covers what the character is doing in the chapter and the purpose behind their actions.

WHERE and WHEN: The “where” and “when” are the clues to the readers of your book so they know at all times where they are as they’re reading. This is where you set the stage for your readers so that they know where (the actual location of the book – perhaps a town, ocean, or another planet) and when (the time period) they are.

WHY: The “why” covers the reason the characters are doing what they are doing. If you have a prologue, the why will not be necessary as you will work on the why throughout the book, but if you have no prologue, why is important in certain chapters.

Let’s go back and take a look at that first scene in the movie “Sleepy Hollow”. The “who” is the man in the stage coach with the powdered wig AND the headless driver. The “what” concerns the man in the stage coach who sees the headless driver, jumps and runs into the cornfield. You know that he is terrified which is what causes him to act as he does. “Where” and “When” is depicted in the clothing of the characters, the stage coach, the unpaved road the coach is traveling, the woods and the cornfield. Why the man is afraid, why he jumps and why his head is removed by a headless man is unknown as yet because this part of the movie is a prologue. However, you know that it will all come into focus as you move further into the movie.

If you cover who, what, where, when, and why in each chapter, your readers will never be lost and you will leave no stone unturned.

With the “table of contents” you are creating, you also need to think about the emotion that you wish your readers to have when they are reading a particular chapter. You want emotion to be a huge part of your novel – bringing them up, stabilizing, up, stabilizing, and up to the climactic point where their emotions are at their highest. After that, it’s a slow descent to understanding why everything happened as it did within the novel. This descent should truly only encompass one chapter, but that will depend on the genre you have chosen. The descent is the wind down of all your readers have experienced and the follow up of what happens to all the characters within.

In essence, as you’ve probably heard before, every book needs a beginning (where what is going to happen and who your characters are is introduced), a middle (where your characters go through whatever you have planned for them), and an ending (where your readers are left with no questions about the characters and the whole book makes perfect sense to them). Most writing courses hammer “plot” over and over into your head, but it is my opinion that a plot has the tendency to change as you work with your characters. So, if you have planned a beginning, middle and an end, along with your “table of contents”, your book will basically write itself.

You may be wondering why I did not include “HOW” in the list of things to include in each chapter. I believe that HOW is taken care of on its own as you plan your novel and comes out on its own in your writing. If your novel is a murder mystery, you will automatically be writing the HOW when you describe the reason your character is terrified. If you’re writing a romance novel, you’ll automatically describe HOW your characters meet. So, if you make sure that who, what, where, when and why are a part of each chapter, the HOW will come through on its own.

It may be helpful when writing your “table of contents” to imagine that you are actually writing a script for a movie. This is helpful to some people because it creates a picture of each scene within your mind and it is possible to see what you may be missing to make the entire novel crystal clear to your readers.

ASSIGNMENT

Using the novel idea you came up with, I want you to create your “table of contents”. You don’t have to name your chapters at this point unless you want to, but each chapter should give a full visualization of what you want to happen in each chapter from the beginning of the chapter to the end of the chapter.

You can write out your description of each chapter in paragraph form or you can list who, what, when, where and why, then put your description in paragraph form. Use whatever method is most comfortable to you.

After each chapter description, you need to list the emotion you want your readers to get from the chapter. This can be one emotion or several – the choice is yours.

Full description of your characters is not necessary at this time, but it is important to know whether your characters are man, woman, child, creature or other.