Advice for writers – find your story and render a novel.

A Mindset Shift That Can Get You Published is a great article I stumbled upon.

If, like me, you wrote a novel without any planning – maybe during NaNoWriMo month – and are now wondering whether your new masterpiece is publishable, this article explains why it certainly isn’t.

Larry Brooks says:

.. your draft doesn’t stand a chance until the story is solidly, front to back, fully conceived. If you haven’t landed on a theme, a pace, on context and sub-text, if you haven’t discovered what your character arc is, if you don’t know how things are going to end…

And his advice, in a nutshell, is this –

Consider writing as two sequential processes:
1. The search for the story.
2. The rendering of the story.

What excellent advice this is. So, I must treat my NaNoWriMo writing as the search for my story (which it was). Now all I have to do (all!) is render it into a proper novel by rewriting it.

For the rewriting, I will turn to Holly Lisle for help. She shares an excellent article,‘How to Revise a Novel’ on her website.

First of all, I have to finish the damn thing.