A Journey of a Thousand Steps

It can be a bit overwhelming when thinking about writing a first whole novel. That is eventually my goal, but before I start with Chapter 1 there is a lot of work to be done. Character/setting development, grammar to learn, plot outlines, and liquor to stock up on. I have a lot of hard questions to tackle like "why do people want to read my stories?"

When you have as many novels and as much experience as an author like Stephen King, you can sit down and just start writing. I've heard this is called "by the seat of your pants" style. As much as I wish I could do that, I'm not any good at it. I'm a planner - to such a degree that I don't even walk in to a grocery store without a list. I stumbled across advancedfictionwriting.com where the author of that website, Randy Ingermanson has what he calls "The Snowflake" method. It's a great way to organize a novel and I've tried it a couple of times. I find the first steps very helpful to get the ball rolling.

So now that I have a whole hand full of one liners from last week, I can develop them in to full plots. That is what I'll be doing next.