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Write Your Novel Intuitively
There is no secret method to writing a novel. Every author develops his or her own process based on personal preferences and work habits. Some writers are free and intuitive in their approach. Others are structured and organized. How you choose to attack the novel writing process is largely up to you. In this article, we're going to take a look at an intuitive approach. Traditionally, when you prepare to write a novel you develop a synopsis, a thorough outline, a list of characters, and you have a fairly strong sense of how everything is going to unfold. When you write intuitively (and let me clarify here, all writers write intuitively to some degree, what we're talking about here is really about making the entire process intuitive) you give away much of your control. You allow yourself to move somewhat blindly through the landscape or your story. This begins with an idea or a character. If you have neither at this point, then open a newspaper or a magazine or watch the news and write down anything that strikes you as interesting. Make a list of items or people that you'd like to explore further. Once you have a list, narrow it down to a single item or a single person. Okay, time to turn everything over to your intuition. Let's say you've come up with a character you'd like to build your novel arround. Write down everything you already know about this character: name, age, sex, appearance, background. Anything and everything that you feel you already know about the character.   If you want to become a novelist, a good one, and you’re not sure what you must to do to develop the skills you need, Andrea Rains Waggener wants to help you. A novelist who sold her first novel for a nice advance to one of the biggest publishers in the world, Bantam Dell, Andrea Rains Waggener has created a plan that makes it easy to go from novel idea to completed, publishable novel. Next, sit with a notebook or at your computer, close your eyes and visualize this character. Make the character as real as you can. Take notes of anything you haven't previously recorded. Note the environment. Note the appearance. Note the situation. Don't force anything. Just take in what appears to you and write it down. You'll be surprised how much unfolds right before your eyes. You're writing a novel now. You're in the process. It's just a matter of writing down what you see. Don't limit yourself. Don't worry about how good it is. Don't edit anything. Just go with what comes to you. After you finish the first scene, start on the second scene and approach it the same way ... simply close your eyes and jump into it. Follow this process to the end, and you'll have your first draft completed. Don't let it scare you. It's not going to be perfect. The story will have holes here and there. Some scenes will be too long or too short. Some characters will be too vague, some will be on stage too long. All of these are common issues after a first draft. The hard work's been done. You have a story on paper. Now it's time to switch gears and work on the second draft. The process of editing is entirely different than the process of writing. The first step is to go through the story, identify the holes and fill them. The second step is reorganize any chapters or sub-chapters that need moving. The third step is to go through the story page-by-page, line-by-line and clean it up.
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