Alright, now that you have every thing you need to put together your plot, it’s time to slide it all together. Your characters, theme, character arc, plot, story, goal, motivations, message, snippets and epic scenes are ready to be set down into a time line.
1: Set it Down
To start, just…start. There isn’t much too it. Just slap down all the ideas you have into the places they are supposed to go. All your little ideas will slide into place. It’s a great feeling when you see all you things you’ve developed suddenly click together into the outline of a novel.
Even though you want to think hard about where the plot and characters are going to go, you can always go back and reconstruct your outline. So just have fun, and slide those pieces together. Sometimes you’ll come to a place that you know should have more story in it or more time in the book, so sometimes you’ll have to figure out how to extend what you already have. But it’s not very hard. I actually find making the outline for your novel one of the funnest parts of the whole writing craft!
2: The Perfections
When you are finished with your outline, then step away for a day or two, take a complete break from writing or write something else, and then come back too it. Now you will see the little places that the characters are inconsistent with their decisions and the tweaks you will have to make, but most of the time that doesn’t take very long. Keep working on it if you want, or you can step away from it. It is only your outline, so it doesn’t have to be perfect. When you are finished with your outline and have decided that it is good, then congratulations! Your outline, the skeleton of your novel, is complete!
3: More Outside Input
You totally don’t have to do this step, but if you want too (and I think it’s a good idea), you can go out with the skeleton of your novel and show it to some people. They can tell you what they like about the story, they can tell you what they think could be tweaked, and all of that. Even though this step isn’t necessary, it is a good thing if you want to have a great skeleton of your novel before you begin the actual writing.
So, if you do accept the help of the outside world, make the last final tweaks, and then your skeleton is officially complete.
Here are the steps to actually setting down your plot and characters, and finally having the complete layout of your novel, how many chapters it will have, and how it will go. Please keep up to date with my blog if you want to continue reading this blog series, and if you don’t want to miss a post again, receive writing updates from me, and get two exclusive short stories along the way, join my email list here!
CALEB.
The other day I found something really cool and I thought because you write medieval/Celtic/fantasy/whatsitcalled stuff it’d be awesome for you, so yeah… Just raambling now…
Anyway, it’s called conlanging. Conlang is short for constructed language. Look it up, it’s awesome! I found it just in time, too, because I was kinda freaking out about one of my next WIPs, The Fire King… XD It’s inspired a lot of new stuff for it, mostly origin that I’ll probably include in a probably existent sequel. XD
So that was randomized but I’m not gonna try to make it less confusing because I’m too lazy to do that. XD
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So what is it?
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A conlang (short for CONstructed LANGuage) is basically a language that you consciously create. If you get into it at all you’ll get blasted in the face with a whole bunch of technical linguistic stuff that’s kinda overwhelming at first, but you’ll get it. It’s SUPER fun and interesting, here’s some links to my favorite conlangers so far: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeh-pJYRZTBJDXMNZeWSUVA, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-UXqiQQqGuWilWykHyhqxg, https://www.youtube.com/user/Xidnaf (Those are YouTubers, I don’t know if you’re allowed to use YouTube), http://www.zompist.com/resources/, https://conlang.org/. There’s also a documentary on conlanging, you can find it on Amazon Prime, but here’s the site for it (it does feature LGBT people but it’s really interesting): http://conlangingfilm.com/
So yeah I don’t know how else to explain it. There you go. XD
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Huh. I might look into it!
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Yes, do so! It would enhance your books by a thousand! Of course, you don’t want to bombard your readers with your language in a book, you just use it when your POV character has no idea what that means or if there’s writing somewhere, but it makes it seem more realistic. 🙂
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Yeah cool!
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