There are, of course, many ways to go about writing a book.
But having worked with hundreds of authors over the last decade, I’m absolutely convinced the most efficient, effective, and productive way of doing so is by planning ahead.
Knowing where your book is going, who it’s about, what it has to say about the world, and why readers are going to love it before you even write the first page frees up creativity, relieves stress, and speeds up the entire writing process.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I explain my personalized approach to story planning and explain how you can create a rock-solid outline for your novel in thirty days or less.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #135 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #135 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T Johns here.
In a recent episode—I don’t remember which one it was—but recently I remember talking about how life isn’t binary, how especially these days, for some reason, we love to think of things as being good or bad or black or white or, or white or laughed. And I think the whole idea of pantsers and planners, it is a bit of the same misguided thinking. There are shades of gray all over the place in the world. And so the idea that you’re either a planner or a dancer, and that these are two completely different things. I think it’s largely a failure of creative thinking and really doesn’t reflect the reality of what storytelling involves and what writing a professional quality novel that people actually want to read involves because there are indisputable fundamentals of the craft.
A story needs a beginning and a middle and an end; a story needs conflict. A story needs a theme. A story needs a character to go on a journey or have a character arc, learn some skill, or overcome a flaw. I mean, these are the fundamentals of Western storytelling at least. And so if you sit down and you make your book up as you go along, if you’re a pantser or a discovery writer, you write your book and then you go backwards and you apply all those things to it. You say, “Okay, when does act one end? And when does act two, start?” Your book needs to be getting in a middle and an end, regardless of whether you were thinking about those, whether you, when you were writing them or not, your book needs characters, all the things I just outlined you apply them retroactively.
So you get to this point where you have a book where all the fundamentals have been executed on. You’ve just applied them after the story’s been written planners on the other hand, think about all of these things beforehand, in hopes of making the writing experience quicker, easier, and more productive. And ultimately you get to that same spot. You get to a draft of the book that isn’t close to being done that needs a lot of work and Polish, but that tells a full story and has most of the fundamentals of the craft executed on can both options work? Absolutely. I’m not disputing that, but is one option quicker, easier, and more fun <laugh>. And that is planning ahead. I’ve written a dozen books folks. I’ve worked with hundreds of authors. Every single time. People put a little bit of forethought before they write their book. Things go easier, swifter better. And we have a better draft of the manuscript, not a finished draft, but a better draft way quicker.
This whole idea of making things up as they go along. I don’t even know where it really comes from. I can’t think of an industry in the world where you don’t plan ahead. I mean, the most obvious thing is when you’re building a building, <laugh> you do blueprints you plan ahead. You make sure that it’s architecturally sound you know, surgeons, doctors, dentists, teachers, none of these people go into their profession, winging it, even something like sports, which is so dependent on luck situation. The way a puck happens to slide or the way a ball happens to get caught or not. All of those teams professionally go into the game with a plan of attack.
Planning is essential to success in most aspects of life. There’s the saying, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” And I don’t know why it’s become so acceptable to think that in the arts and in writing in general, you just sit down and this book is supposed to magically pour out of you and be perfect without any forethought. It takes way more effort. I believe to retroactively apply the fundamentals to a manuscript that was made up as it went along than it is to think about the fundamentals ahead of time, and then apply them while you’re drafting. I’ve worked with hundreds of writers over the last decade. And when they come to me, the first thing we do is put together a plan of attack. We ask ourselves the fundamental questions about storytelling. We say, what genre is this story? What are the conventions of this genre?
What are the expectations of the reader? I always call genre a contract with the reader. We’re making a promise to them that we’re going to tell a certain type of story. And when we don’t deliver on those promises, they don’t like our book. So if you want to write a book that people love and that they buy, and that is a success, you need to think about these things. And, and when you don’t, drafting a manuscript, particularly that first draft can be really, really challenging. People, get overwhelmed, people get lost. I don’t even know where the story’s going and they get filled with self-doubt. And there are so many memes out there on the internet about how difficult it is to be a writer and how sometimes you’re feeling up. And sometimes you’re feeling down and you never quite know where you’re going. And all of that is true to a certain extent, but I think a lot, lot of it reflects the author who is making it up as they go along.
Of course, you’re lost. Of course, you’re overwhelmed. Of course, you don’t know if it’s any good or not, because you’re just throwing words down on the page rather than executing on the fundamentals of storytelling. And so after teaching people, these fundamentals, and after working with writer, after writer, after writer on a plan of attack for their novels, what I eventually did a year ago was I took all of my resources, all of my best training, all of my ideas about what we should do upfront before we start drafting a book and I put them into a program called STORY PLAN, and this is a four-week program. So I’m not saying you need to spend six months planning a book. In fact, I don’t want you spending more than a month or maybe a little more than that.
Planning a book. I really think four weeks is actually the amount of time. If you work intensively on the planning process during those four weeks, you can absolutely finish a rock-solid outline. That’s going to cut the drafting time of your book. It’s going to make fewer revisions when it does come time to start revising. And it’s just going make the quality of your book better and the process of writing it more fun. And so that is what STORY PLAN, which I launched a year ago, was all about. And I’ve now run two rounds of it. Plus I’ve done it kind of one on one with some of my one-on-one clients and the results I’ve gotten. Well, the results my clients have gotten are, are just incredible. It’s amazing to see something go from a germ of an idea or a vague concept and have it fleshed out into a completed outline within four weeks time.
I love seeing that amazing process. So if you’re curious about STORY PLAN, what sort of things we do in there? Well, we, as I said, we explore your story’s genre so that we can be super clear that you’re hitting the necessary conventions, tropes, obligatory scenes, all these things that need to be in your narrative to live up to the reader’s expectation of that type of story. We also look at macro story structure, you know, big level global story structure. That’s that beginning, middle and end thing we’re talking about. And of course, as sophisticated writers, we push it beyond the beginning, middle, and end. We start talking about maybe a four-act structure, or we talk about the hero’s journey, or we talk about Sean Coyne’s, you know, three big moments in the middle build structure. We look at different ways of structuring a story, but in doing so we know that the pacing of the story is going to work structure, largely controls the pacing.
And so that big concern of, “Oh, is this book boring?” “Oh, am I in the beginning? Or the middle?” “Oh, are the right things happening at the right time?” Well, let’s figure out that beforehand before you start putting words down on the page. And then of course we look at characters. Characters are the core of storytelling. I was just saying this to a client. When you think about Harry Potter, do you think about the need to, solve the the riddle of whatever right? Tom Riddle’s book, right? Do you think about, oh, he had the, he found Tom Riddle’s book and it turned out to be a horcrux? No, you would never describe Harry Potter like that. You’d say, oh yeah, Harry Potter, Ron and Harry and Hermione. It’s the characters that you think about. So we absolutely do some thinking ahead of time about characters and arc. That said planning does not suck the creativity out of a book out of a storytelling process.
It is giving you a foundation to build upon. And I find perhaps more than anything else, characters come alive in the writing characters reveal themselves to you as an author characters, surprise you. And, and that happens in every draft of the book that you go through. But we absolutely want to think about character before we even begin so that we know where we’re starting from. And when we do these things, you’re able to go into drafting, confident that you’re applying the techniques necessary for the book to be a success. May am I saying it’s going to be the greatest thing in the world? Nope. It’s going to need many more drafts, but it’s going to be so much better than if you didn’t take four weeks, just four weeks to think about these sorts of things. Another thing that planning can help with is this whole idea of overwhelm and, like a book is a massive project with many steps and then many little details within it.
It’s very easy. I see so many clients go, oh, I, I kind of forgot about that character or, oh, I, I kind of forgot about that world-building moment. And so what we do via STORY PLAN is using that macro-level story structure. We get that big-level view of the story. We’ve managed to kind of pull in all these crazy ideas and put them in an order that makes them manageable and understandable instead of overwhelming. But then what we do is we break that down further into medium-sized chunks. We’re talking sequences, we’re talking acts so that when you sit down to write, you don’t have to have the entire book in your head. You have that somewhere else in the outline that you’re going to complete. You’re only worrying about that little act or that little sequence that’s in front of you, or you’re drilling down even further. And you’re looking at things on the micro level and you’re saying, what, what do I need to achieve in this scene? Or what beat, what emotional beat am I trying to get across here?
And I have something called the Russian doll method or, actually, I changed it with the war in Ukraine. My family’s from Estonia, so I call it my Estonia doll method now. But what we do is we take these complicated and intricate processes of story mapping, and we turn them into manageable and workable chunks, an outline that you can use to guide you through the drafting process, instead of letting your story take control of you. Speaking of the story, taking control that that idea of being lost in the woods of saying, I thought I was telling one story. Now I’m off track. I don’t know what this is anymore. Well, when you plan ahead of time, when you have something like an outline, it works as a story development tool. So you can use it to craft the story in a way that ensures where it goes next, and gets it to where it ultimately needs to go rather than wandering off course and never getting to your ultimate destination. It becomes a roadmap for the drafting process, you know, where the book is going. Do you know all the details has all the surprise and mystery been sucked out of it.
Absolutely not. But you at least have a map of some kind that’s going to lead you from one end of the woods to the other so that you don’t get off track and get eaten by a bear <laugh>. And finally, when you do a plan ahead of time, largely an outline that I’m talking about and that I teach in STORY PLAN. You have a document that doesn’t just serve you in the drafting of the first draft. It becomes into an evergreen document. It’s going to grow and it’s going to change absolutely as you revise and change the book, but it can be there to serve as this fundamental or foundational framework upon which your revision process can then be mapped. This is why I like to call the STORY PLAN, an idea creation machine, or a drafting roadmap, as well as a framework for the revisions process. It’s a document that can guide your focus and give you direction throughout the creation of your novel, not just during the first draft.
So you never have to feel that you’re lost at any point, whether that’s first draft, whether that’s sixth draft, you have a clear path to follow, you know, where you are going. So again, can you make things up as you go along? Absolutely you can. Is it easier, quicker, more fun if you plan it ahead, I’m convinced that it is and having run STORY PLAN INTENSIVE a few times.
Now I’m even more convinced that it’s the path to drafting success. That’s why I’m really excited to let you know that the next round of STORY PLAN kicks off on October 3rd, the first week of October. I think October 1st is a Saturday, and October 2nd is a Sunday. That means Monday, October, the third, we are getting in gear four weeks of training, support tools, and strategies that are going to get you to an outline within 30 days or less.
And the best part about STORY PLAN is that it’s free. When I first launched it, I launched it as a $500 program, and people happily paid that. In fact, one of the people who originally signed up for the program at, at the original price, when I then launched it as a free challenge, she came back and did it again. She loved it so much. The paid version that she went and did the whole process over again for a second book a few months later. And so, and so this is a hugely valuable program, but once again, I’m giving it away for free. All you have to do to participate, to get involved in STORY PLAN INTENSIVE, this October is get on my mailing list. Now head on over to my website, www.kevintjohns.com. There’s a popup. There’s also a link at the top that says “free book.”
That’s where I give away my free book, Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors. Get that free book as a gift from me, get on my mailing list because really soon, I’m going to start sending out emails saying the gates are open. It’s time to sign up now. And because this is a free program and I need to keep the manageable numbers. There’s not going to be like a month of open gates, right? So you wanna be there when the gates open so that you can get signed up and that you can’t put together a plan for your story. That’s going to set you up for long-term success.
Now I’m not oblivious to what time of the year it is folks. I know that National Novel Writing Month is coming up two months from now. I’m recording this Friday, September 9th, and it’s only a few months away. And I know a lot of you listening to this and you are possibly considering taking part in national novel writing month. Well, unfortunately, the statistics consistently show that people fail to complete national novel writing month. I think the goal is 50,000 words in a month’s time. Very few people achieve that. And those who do actually rarely go on to publish their NaNoWriMo manuscript because they realize the manner in which it was written, the scramble, the making it up as they went along, has left them with what I like to call a “shaggy dog” manuscript. And it needs so much shampooing and fluffing and brushing that it just becomes too much work for them. But if you want to sit down every day of November, knowing exactly what needs to happen in your story and writing with the confidence that you’re executing on the fundamentals that make for a popular book.
Well, that’s a different story, isn’t it? So if you’re planning to do NaNoWriMO this November, get into STORY PLAN. When it opens up STORY PLAN is going to be the perfect program to set you up for success in November. So again, all you have to do get over to my website. Get on my mailing list by downloading your free copy of Novel Advice. And in a week or two, now you’re going to see an email. That’s going to say STORY PLAN INTENSIVE is back, get signed up. And that’s the only way you’re going to be able to get there. So get on that mailing list.
Can you tell, I’m excited? I love this program so much. When you create something like this, you never quite know how well it’s going to work. You know, I’ve been working with writers for a very long time, and I was confident I was going to have success, but the type of success I see coming out of STORY PLAN, the types of books that I’ve been written over the last year because people participated in the winter round of STORY PLAN or people participated in the original Fall 2021 round.
It’s incredible books are being written, and they’re being written quickly, efficiently in a fun manner because of STORY PLAN. So get on over to my website, get on my mailing list, get signed up for STORY PLAN. It is an email every day, every weekday for a month with a new training video each day, homework on the Friday. And if you watch the videos, if you do the homework, you are going to have an incredible novel by the end of October, and you’ll be ready to rock come November.
All right. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to hit subscribe so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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