BAM

Inspiration strikes.

Candyland.

That glorious idea for a book slams into your head with the force of an F5 tornado, destroying everything in its path, swirling you around until you don’t know which end is up. A chaotic mess of scenes, characters, plot twists, and details pour out of your head and splatter across page after page of paper until the flood turns into a trickle. Then, you have dozens upon dozens of pages of notes. You change character names halfway through. The main character who started out as a teacher turns into a statistician. The daughter turns into a son at some point.

But you have a place to start.

It takes days to spread out all these pages of notes and make sense of your doodles and scribblings. Some things won’t make any sense and they get discarded. Some ideas will lead to other ideas while you’re in the shower and your mind is relaxed. Best of all though, you have momentum. You’re excited about the story and looking forward to meeting the characters.

You haven’t hit that mid-book, oh my God is it over yet, can’t I just write the end now part of your story.

Monopoly.

Have you ever played Monopoly? It’s goes on forever until you and your little brother finally give up, throw your play money at your older sister, and run away screaming before you try to swallow one of those little plastic houses so it can get lodged in your throat and save you from the boring-as-fuck game.

That’s what writing the middle of a book is like.

After you discern the usable nuggets of gold from the shrapnel of the miscellaneous pieces of information that exploded from your brain, it’s time to draw that picture, whatever picture of the story arc you use (I use Michael Hague’s Story Master diagram), and piece your chaos into some kind of order. What’s your hook? What’s your inciting incident? How do you introduce your characters while the story is in motion? What do you absolutely have to tell your reader, and how do you sprinkle that in without an info dump? What are your character’s goals? What are his motivations? What kind of conflict are you going to throw in his path? What’s the climax for your book? How do you end it with emotional satisfaction? All of these little ideas, these plot points are charted out so you’ll know what happens next.

By now, I’m exhausted, how about you?

But here, we get to the fun part, we get to the fast-paced Mario Kart adventure, holding on for dear life as we twist and fly around every turn. Now, we weave in subplots, character arcs, and themes. We have to bring our setting to life. Some of it is just for us, and no one will recognize that the bullets in the gun were made from the dead kid’s pewter chess set. They’re Easter eggs to hide throughout the book for those who are truly paying attention. These are the readers who climb right in the driver’s seat with us as we take them to Heaven.

So, now our Scrivener is full of notes, timelines, character profiles, setting descriptions, pieces of dialogue, and inspirational pictures galore. We’ll add to our little book encyclopedia as we go, but for now, our fingers are primed, Word is open, and we are ready.

Let the checkered flag fall.

Ready.

Set.

GO.