Unlock the Hidden Secrets to Transforming Your Novel from Good to Unforgettable
In my book Writing Fiction for Dummies, I talked about “creative paradigms”—various methods that novelists use to write the first draft of their novel. There are many creative paradigms that work. Here are four common creative paradigms that I identified in my book:
- Seat Of The Pants—you just sit down and type your first draft without planning your story and without editing anything. You keep pressing forward until the first draft is done.
- Edit As You Go—you sit down and type your first draft without planning, but you edit each page and/or each scene many times before moving on to the next.
- The Snowflake Method—you use my wildly popular 10-step Snowflake Method of planning your story before you write it.
- Outlining—you create a long and detailed synopsis (sometimes up to 100 pages). Then you write the draft following your outline.
There’s no one best method of writing a first draft that works for everybody. I think it’s worth learning how other authors do it, because that can give you ideas on how to do it yourself. But ultimately, you get to choose the method that works best for you. If it works for you, then nobody has the right to tell you you’re “doing it wrong.”
