Throughout my life, I’ve always wanted to learn things linearly. You do this, then this, then you're there. It’s been an extremely tough, but important, lesson that I’ve learned that activities involving comprehension and learning are usually best approached iteratively. You don’t cover-to-cover a text book and walk away a master. You read it once, absorb half of it at best, become a practitioner of it, learn all of the pitfalls and frustrating parts by trying to put it into practice, read it again, and then a lot of that other half you didn’t comprehend or give appropriate attention to suddenly sticks with you given a better/new understanding and context. With shorter reference materials, like a baking class on YouTube for example, you do this process over and over. It’s a cyclical, iterative, thing. Writing is especially like this.
There’s a million ways to write a novel, no wrong answers, but how I do it is an iterative approach where you learn more about your story and dig a bit deeper each time. I’ve already writen about a character first approach to story craft, and likewise the high level things you should care about when writing a first draft, but I haven’t laid out a process. What do you actually do to get from a cool character and vague ideas to a first draft. Well, that’s what I do here. I will point back to my ‘things to care about in a first draft’ post quite a bit as offering some guiding principles, but this is the gritty mechanics of it. This is you wanting to get your hands dirty.
Your world really should be built around your characters, but some vague sense of what you want is a great start. A classic medieval fantasy setting with cliche hero’s journey vibes, a gritty modern urban murder noir style, an introspective turn of the century coming of age novel - you get the idea. Nothing concrete is in stone here, but a vague sense of setting and vibes is established. I often juggle brainstorming this in contemplation with my theme. Does the setting and vibe match my theme, and does it give me a lot of room to explore it?
With the above figured out, I’ll absolutely geek out on my point of view characters. This is the classic misbelief, fear, motivation, and all that sort of stuff. I’ve explored how to do this in great depth in my character blog post.
With my setting and character in hand, I now feel comfortable actually taking a loose stab at what might actually happen in my story. Sure, it’s true that after workshopping all of the above I might have already had some vague ideas for this pop into my head, but I just let them float there until now.
A but non-traditional, but I’ll break out a piece of paper and a whiteboard and ‘graph’ the vague plot points for each character. I’ll have 7ish or 8ish, and I plot them on a paper like a graph in math class (but not in a grid, just vibes). A plot point is placed higher than the last as the tension and stakes increase, lower if it settles down. So I usually end up drawing a little (skewed to the right) mountain looking graph with just a handful of points. Things like “finds first clue”, or “breaks into lab”, or “kills the antagonist's son”. The important part is that these are non-comital guiding ideas. In future steps, when I spell out my character story arcs, I will try to guide it through these points like gates in a downhill ski race, but I won’t force it through them (see next section on what to do if this doesn’t line up well).
This is the first time I start getting super concrete about precisely what is going to happen in the story. I really like to use Ellen Brock's "The Character Arc meets Story Structure" video as a baseline for a character arc if I feel like I need something to follow. And I simply start putting down cool scenes that can happen to force the characters emotions and worldview towards the next step in the character arc progression I desire - and I do this while trying to keep it true to the vague plot points from before. This can get pretty granular, scene by scene even at times (although it doesn’t have to be comprehensively so). This can be tricky though, if I had planned for the main character to feel depression and shame, and the plot point is them winning the lottery, I either need to get really creative - or more often than not it’s a big red flag for me that I’ve mismatched what I envision this story being like plot-wise versus the character and character arc-wise. If this is the conclusion I come to, I’ll then either go all the way back around and rework other character or the vague plot points to work with the story I want to tell (I modify whichever seems to be failing my expectations).
Now, finally, we can dive into that aspect of fantasy writing that is nerds get so damned excited about. We can finally start doing some in-depth, concrete, world building. We can build out cultures and institutions and geographies through maps. There are no limits. The one rule I offer is just to make sure it is still character-centric, that it is being done with an eye to providing characters ‘fiddly bits’. World building components they can concretely tie to or interact with. So, if you want to build a robust food culture, make one of your characters a cook or a rich person that dines out a lot. If you want to have a ton of competing political warrior clans, make your character a warrior (or the world most stressed out medieval lawyer!) If you can, make them meaningful fiddly bits. Not just fun factoids, but structural concrete things to how the characters behave and view themselves. Everyone is from somewhere, and that usually comes with a sense of local pride or hatred, and certainly customs and sayings, for example.
We're pretty close to done now. We have all the puzzle pieces we need, now it’s time to put it all together. I’ll take the near scene-by-scene map my character arcs gave me, I’ll flatten them into one progression if I’ve got multiple characters, I’ll have notes and dotted lines departing when we cross important parts of a character arc or plot. I’ll call out major fiddly bits or world building things, or especially when I get the chance in a multi-POV story for POV characters to directly interact. I just make one giant map.
And the moment you’ve all been waiting for - go write! Do so with intention, but also don’t cripple yourself with doubt. Just keep in mind the essentials of a story as you do this. Be critical but also forgiving on yourself. When you have all of this already in hand, you’ll be shocked how easy the words flow from your finger tips. Yes - you still have a ton of wiggle room for characters and scenes and meandering and creativity, but you also have the comfort of having some decent sense of direction and an understanding of the actual core foundational things you cannot skip, as well as solid confidence that all of those foundational components are both sound and compelling.
Enjoy!