10 Tips to Write a Novel

This advice is directly linked with the previous one and is also about helping you keep your story consistent.

A book, despite all the imagination, energy and emotions it contains, remains a string of words. The good thing is, as you’ll hear from people who were disappointed by the movie version of the books they love, that a text means you can visualize your own version of the story, while any kind of visual work will necessarily force a certain picture onto the viewer.

True enough, but to have pictures of what we’re writing will also make the specific items more real, along with the story as a whole and the universe (which helps keep the motivation up), and simplify the writing process.

So it’s not about publishing your visual creations, but simply having them with you so you can use them and make things easier for yourself. Indeed, having a drawing (as ugly as it may be) or a picture will simplify descriptions (objects, characters, landscapes…). Drawing the schematics of a building with a view from above will help you remain consistent when telling of the events taking place there (for example you won’t write that somebody came in from the window and, two chapters later, insist that this room has no window). If you make a map of the fictional world, you can put various places on it and calculate distances and thus travel duration depending on transportation means. Drawing a chronology of the novel’s universe will allow for accurate and consistent historical references throughout the tale, and so on.

Maybe some people don’t need this, but I know each scene came to me as an image filmed by a camera that I have then described. As such, drawing it on paper helped me a lot (even though I’m incredibly bad at drawing!). And when it comes to the world map, it was vital in order to know how long it took from one city to another and to be able to follow the flow of time. I was even lucky enough to have a carpenter make a wooden version of the two main characters’ swords, so that I could see how big they were and how to handle them.

So don’t hesitate to draw and/or create “for real” some elements of your story to give it more depth and to simplify the work aiming at keeping it logical (descriptions, distance calculations, chronologies, proper handling of certain items…).