Book Writing Techniques For Novice Writers

Writing a novel is a challenging and time-consuming task even for experienced writers. And for the first-time novelists the task can be truly daunting to write an entire book of fiction. Novel writing is more than just filling pages for the sake of it. To write a successful novel, it must be able to hold the reader's interest from start to finish.

Here a few book writing tips and techniques for novel writers that may help to write a good novel:

RESEARCH BEFORE YOUR START

Even before you write your first page, try to do maximum random research on a variety of subjects that might appeal to you as potential themes for your proposed novel. Once you have done adequate research and applied your own thought and imagination to it, you will slowly arrive at a short-list of ideas or themes that attract you most naturally and strongly. Out of these short-listed options, you must spend time and contemplate which one out of them would suit you the most, and which is also unique, relevant and interesting subject for the mass readers.

THINK OF THE BASIC PLOT

Once the theme of your novel has been finalized, you need to give sufficient thought to the basic plot of your novel. Write down your ideas, and keep writing and revising till you have arrived at some concrete thoughts about the plot of your novel. The plot

should be original, substantive and gripping enough to give rise to a great storyline with several sub-plots included in its folds.

OUTLINE THE CHARACTER SKETCHES

Imagine the characters who are going to fill the plot and enact all the aspects of your story. Spend sufficient time on creating and developing each character. You can take inspiration from real life characters, or just create some totally imaginary characters that may have always fascinated you. Give as much identity and detail to each character as possible in your rough draft. It will help you to tell the story in an interesting manner through these characters if the characters are developed in thorough detail in advance.

CONNECT ALL THE SUB-PLOTS COHESIVELY

It is important to remember that a novel is a single story that runs through all the pages. The reader must not miss the connections, and the basic theme or basic undercurrent of the story must remain consistent and cohesive with all the sub-plots of the story. You cannot have a loose collection of sub-plots that are good individually, but collectively they do not fit each other. You will lose the reader's interest if the plot is not moving in a unified direction.

WRITE A ROUGH DRAFT AND BE PREPARED TO REVISE

A novel may have to go through several drafts and revisions before you can reach your desired output. While you write the initial drafts, the story ideas will keep generating on its own, and your novel will keep getting refined as you continue to write and re-write the drafts.

SOLICIT FEEDBACK FROM EXPERIENCED WRITERS AND READERS

Keep seeking opinions of some of your trusted and most intellectually inclined friends or relatives, who may be able to give you valuable feedback and comments. Invite their frank criticism, as only that will help you to see the basic errors and flaws in your work. Keep improvising till you are fully satisfied with the results.

SUMMARY: Novel writing is a challenging task that requires tremendous amount of hard work, thought, creativity, imagination and systematic working. If one follows the basic techniques of fiction writing, it is not impossible to produce a great novel.