How to write a Novel?

Pragya Priyadarshani
5 min readApr 21, 2024

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Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pixels

Novels are mostly fictional stories penned down in a specific genre for the readers to read the novel with immense curiosity and interest. A novel has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is elongated in a form of more than 50,000 to 110,000 words and is longer than a story. What makes it different from the book is that it is written to make the readers traverse through the journey of a long story, along with the complexity of the specific genre. While novels are of numerous genres available in the market to buy for readers, some of them are written simply to make the readers understand and connect to the story more profoundly.

How to prepare to write a novel?

A novel has seven literary elements

  • Idea
  • Character
  • Setting
  • Plot
  • Narratives
  • Theme
  • Conflict

Every novel starts from an idea. An idea can come from anywhere like meaningful conversations, a movie you watched recently, a book you read recently, or a thought that came to your mind for writing a novel or real-life experiences.

  • Idea — You may come across multiple ideas in your mind when you just begin to write a novel. Let your mind flow freely with the ideas and at first without giving it a second thought write freely simple freewriting. Then after writing just read the stuff which you have written and in this way, you can improve more and come up with a good story. Let your mind be prepared to create a plot and characters of the story and where you want to put them. In this way, you will generate more ideas for your story and can make your story profound and thoughtful.
  • Characters — Characters are the people who take a stand or an action in a novel. Many novels have the protagonist who is the main character in the story. The conflict in a novel arises when there are both protagonists and antagonists. The characters in a novel signify the story realistically. It raises the curiosity within the readers to know what comes next.
  • Settings — It is one of the most fundamental parts of the story which reflects when and where it happened. Suppose there is a war going on and when it has been ended so this can be the example which comes in the settings. So the author can connect the readers with his or her story actually by simply mentioning the place and the date.
  • Plot and Narrative — The plot and narrative are intertwined with each other but they are not the same thing. Both of them are the critical parts of the story which reflect the writer’s perspective of thoughts to narrate the story.
  • Theme — When the writer is beginning to write a novel then he must have a thoughtful perspective in his mind to write a novel. The theme of the novel is based on the characters and plot of the novel which is profoundly personified by the author.

How to write a novel in 7 simple steps?

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Once you are well-versed in the 7 components of how to write a novel, it’s time to get back to work and immerse yourself in writing a well-crafted story. It’s the beginning of the idea and the story through multiple drafts and revisions and finally the end to publish your story.

  • Generate Ideas — When there is brainstorming with the ideas you must develop a theme and genre of your story. What do you want to talk about in your story and what will be the beginning, middle and end of the story?
  • Create an outline — The next step to writing a novel is creating an outline. It will help you in mentioning the key points of your plot of the story. It will help the readers to analyse the story and give a brief idea while focusing on the outline of the story.
  • Write a first draft — As you go through the flow of preparing your novel it is important to write your first draft. It might be going messy or you have to rewrite and get it revised multiple times. But once you establish a good story with a meaningful theme and plot of the story then you don’t have to make a lot of changes when once you have to get it done.
  • Seek Feedback — It is important to have feedback from others who are going through your story. It will help you in improving your written piece of work more profoundly. As you begin your journey of writing a story you can’t recognize sometimes what is missing in your plot of the story. In the same way, the readers who are going through your story read from a different perspective so they will help you out all those missing things which need to be put in your story to make it realistically personified.
  • Revise — After writing it is important to revise your work and find what things are missing and what is to be put in the story or a plot. As you revise your draft you come across the mistakes and the grammar spell check and which sentences and the characters of your story should be given more emphasis on. It is a must to revise your draft first before getting it published.
  • Write a second draft — As you write your first draft of a novel then you have to evolve in the second draft of your novel as well. Writing a novel is a long process and you have to come across three to four drafts of a novel after completing your first draft. The first draft of your novel takes six months and it takes years of writing a novel before getting it published.
  • Edit your novel — After the completion of your final draft, it’s time to edit your novel. As you have now a solid piece of work with yourself regarding your novel make edits to your novel. It needs only slight changes in your novel like grammatical errors or an error in spelling. Once you have done with editing it’s time to make your novel get it published.

So here we end up with the processes of writing a novel and how to get it published. Writing a novel is not an easy task. It takes years to write a novel and achieve successful recognition for your work.

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Pragya Priyadarshani
Pragya Priyadarshani

Written by Pragya Priyadarshani

A prolific writer embracing the pursuit of creativity, thriller, adventure, fiction and nonfiction embarked with profound experience and knowledge .✍️

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