If I feel good enough at the third go round, I send it off to beta readers to hack through and I repeat the above steps until I feel it's ready to send to my agent. The third is a kind of read through with a lot of repeating what I do in the second draft. The second draft is spend beefing up and dealing with my comments and the read squiggly lines from draft one. My goal with the first draft is to just get it out of my head. There are so many red squiggly lines and comments throughout the first draft that I can't imagine how a person could think I am an actual writer if they were to read it. Once I have beat that sucker out, I write the first draft. She has a You Tube series on this that is fantastic! Another great plotting book is Martha Alderson's Plot Whisperer. I love Blake Snyder's Save the Catfor screenwriting, but they have also adapted his idea for the novel writer as well. Marinating like this takes some time and while I'm doing that, I begin researching things, places, people, fantastical options and routes I might want to take. Is that stalkerish? Whoops.Īfter the inspiration, I build on that, create an idea, build on that, and so on and so forth until I have a pretty firm story in my head. You can learn so much about a person that way. Be it a picture, an old house I drive by, or a person that catches my eye when I people watch.

For me, I have to be inspired by something in the beginning.

The Carnelian Legacy by Cheryl Koevoet