Cornerstones: How to plan your novel
New in on the Cornerstones blog: how to plan a novel with author Bryony Pearce
Hello authors! Welcome to our new Cornerstones newsletter, bringing you industry tips, tricks, and trends, but through a new, more interactive medium.
We’ve been working away behind the scenes to deliver some new and exciting content to fuel you through your morning coffee break. Our latest post is by one of our own, Cornerstones client-turned-author-turned-editor, Bryony Pearce.
With sections on planning vs. pantsing, the hero’s journey, multiple POVs, and how to avoid common writerly pitfalls, Bryony’s post will help you wrap your head around one of the biggest - and most important - parts of writing: where (and how) to begin!
Here’s a sneak peek into the post:
The thing about making it up as you go along is that those who do it successfully enough to be published already know a lot about writing. Whether they’ve done creative writing courses, read and internalised enough literature to sink a ship, or read ‘how to’ books, they know instinctively where to put in narrative high points and where the story’s beats need to be. If you mentioned the hero’s journey to them, they would likely nod knowledgeably.
What I’m saying is: a good chef knows which ingredients go together before they start chucking ingredients in a pan without a recipe. And a good writer knows how to structure a story properly before chucking words on a page.
Say you left out one element of the hero’s journey. Leaving it out because it’s important to you that it is missing from your story – for whatever reason – is very different from leaving it out because you didn’t know it needed to be there in the first place.
Click here to read on! And a big thank you to Bryony for sharing her wisdom. Bryony’s novel, The Girl on the Platform, is out next month - do take a look!
Why not book in for a batch of mentoring to work on your outline directly with a specialist editor? Get in touch with us via our Contact Us page and we’ll get back to you with our recommendations for next steps.
Until next time,
The Cornerstones team
Well Done Cornerstones... I'm a planner.... or more like a be prepared, with a plan, that may change. (That sounds like packing my rescue kit).... Anyway.... What I learned here from B.Pearce was her formula on structure, ingredients was a key word for me (since I'm the Kitchen Chef of the house). It seemed a bit surgical at first, but keeping those ingredients and re-mixing them so to speak, kind of like a fluid structure, it smooooothed the story line out in waves, yet all connected. It's more clear the highs and lows of the main character, the surrounding people in the story and how and why they act or react the way they do. With that said; the BIG result for me is; I can edit my own work much better using this type of structure aka; ingredients, like self edit very much easier. Is that an intended result? Or is it like take two aspirin for relief now and lets see what else happens in the morning? (smile) In any case it worked, I feel much better, I learned something here* Thank you....... Kris