My 3 Steps for Writing the 1st Draft of My Book

After all the prep work you have done to make your story a reality, now is the time when things get messy and shtuff gets real. Writing the first rough draft is daunting for most writers. You have the story pictured in your mind of how you want it to play out, but now it’s time to put the movie in your brain into words on a page.

Step 1: Dialogue

The best way to start writing a story is dialogue. Character dialogue will be the focus on what readers pay attention too. They don’t care how dreamy your character’s chocolate brown eyes are, and they don’t care if their hair smells like strawberries or dung. Yes, these are important and sometimes necessary details to include in the story, but we can add them later.

What I usually do is write the dialogue between characters, solely the dialogue, and focus on what they are saying in the story. I don’t include the setting, descriptions of characters, or even dialogue tags unless necessary. To keep track of who is speaking and when, I assign each character a color and highlight their speaking part. I can visually distinguish who is speaking, when they are speaking, and how much they are speaking. Maybe my main character is hogging all the glory and needs to take a break. Maybe the side characters are stealing the show and my mc needs to break free and use her/his voice more. Maybe the secondary character only has one line and doesn’t need to exist at all. Just a thought.

Step 2: Add description

Now that the dialogue is complete, you can add the description of the setting, characters, and objects of importance. Some particulars to include for setting are the surroundings of your mc (main character). Where does he/she live? What does his/her country look like? Next, describe the character themselves. Do they have blond/brunette/ruby red/ raven black hair? Are they quiet and shy or loud and a social butterfly? What color are their eyes? Any features like dimples, scars, or birth marks that might set them apart from the other characters? Does your mc think before they act or do they act impulsive and without reason?

Step Three: Thread in the plot sandwich

(more on that in another post)

The plot sandwich (as I call it) consists of a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning should introduce the mc and the main problem of the story. You can have subplots running around like squirrels juggling knives all you want, but you have to make sure the bigger picture problem is at the focal point of the story.

The next layer of our sandwich is the catalyst . Most writing instructors don’t add this... I think I made this up...pretty sure... Anyway, my thought processes on developing a worthy climax of the story is based on a cheese burger. You can slap meat and cheese between two buns and call it a burger, but without the trimmings of veggies, mayo, and ketchup, your burger is pretty bland. Add some spice to the mixture of your story. Throw in a plot twist, a love interest, tragedy, or even a unicorn if you think it'd make the story line more interesting.

A climax will be the middle of the story where the most action happens. It might be the breaking point of a character or the lost of a loved one. For me, I used a battle scene and a death as the climax for my first book in my upcoming series The Light Keeper Chronicles. Tragedy and heartbreak are always fantastic combinations for a climatic mixture to blow up satisfactorily. Shtuff is going to get serious here.

Okay. So we got the bun of problems at the top, the cheesy layer of the catalyst, the meaty mess of the climax, now we need the bottom bun of the solution to complete our sandwich. If you are writing a standalone book, the solution needs to happen. Personally, I think the solution and ending of the book should leave the reader with a bittersweet feeling in their mouth. Sweet because the solution has come and bitter because it’s the end and the author didn’t write a sequel...silly them. If you are like me and you love writing a series, it’s okay not to write the solution to the overall arching problem to the book. Like I said earlier, it’s valuable to have a few sub-plotting squirrels juggling knives over their heads scurrying around in your book. Just make sure they make sense at least, like there might be a purpose behind this subplot and it isn’t simply there because you really want to see that poor squirrel actually juggle a knife...which would be very entertaining now that I think about it.

And that’s a wrap.

You’ve got your dialogue, descriptions, and plot sandwich, plus a few cute acrobatic squirrels. I find this point in time challenging because I don’t always feel like writing after a long hard day at work. When you feel like shoving off the writing for tomorrow, that’s when the writing needs to be done the most.

For all my star wars fans, I found this cute picture I thought appropriate for this post.