Published: Thu 15 June 2023
By Koen Martens
In Author Software .
tags: frontpage-news
This is the first in a series of blog posts I plan to write on my writing and self-publishing process. The series will walk through my process from start to finish, providing an insight in how I write a novel and what tools I use to do so. This is by no means writing advice, telling you that this is how you should do things. Regardless, feel free to copy whatever I do if you think it’ll work for you.
The series will cover the following activities:
Planning (the subject of this post)
Writing
Editing and Revising
Interior Formatting
Publication
Marketing
This article looks at the first of these six stages, planning. This activity is threefold. First of all, there is the story itself. Next, there is the more practical matter of determining a publication date and making sure everything that needs to happen before then happens at the right time. And last but not least there is the financial aspect.
Let’s start with the fun part, though: outlining the story.
Story Outline: A Month of Daydreaming
Day dreaming. That is literally what I’ll be doing the first month and a half before I start writing. I’ll sit in the comfy chair that’s right next to my writing desk, dim the lights, put on some dreamy ambient music on the headphones and just imagine the story unfolding. Sometimes I might be thinking about the big picture. What are the key events that need to happen, what is the end game. Other times, I might be losing myself in the minutia of one of my character’s daily life, imaging how they do what they do, what their environment looks like, feels like.
It is reminiscent of a technique I’ve found on the web a while back called dreamzoning , or ‘daydreaming on steroids’. It’s really effective, both when planning as well as on the more detailed level of putting words to paper, as we’ll see later on in the article on writing.
I also engage in a bit of world-building. Drawing maps (on paper or using wonderdraft ), inventing languages, maybe do some calculations to confirm that the physics of the world I’m creating is at least plausible. I’ll also define each of the main characters’ voices, using the character voice chart template from The Dialogue Doctor.
I really love this part. I can just let my imagination go, explore different avenues, go down storylines without caring about consistency. While my writing time is typically between 19:00 and 21:00 every day, this process tends to continue through-out the day. When I’m eating breakfast or having my lunch break, I’ll be thinking things over. When I’m in bed about to fall asleep, I set my imagination free to conjure up new avenues to explore.
The output of all this activity consists of at least a spreadsheet that outlines the chapters in one-word sentences, listing whose point of view the chapter should be in, where it happens and what its role in the plot is. I will often include a timeline as well that I can refer back to when writing or editing.
More often than not, additional output will be in the form of one or more exploratory chapters. Maybe I’m doing a background study on one of the characters, writing a technical manual of a gadget or device that is part of the characters’ environment or documenting a historical event that influences social customs or idioms. I’ve been using Fantasia Archive to keep all these bits of lore and backstory organised. It not only stores the raw information but also lets me link one bit of lore to another bit, or a character to a place or another character. Not everything I put into this preparatory material will end up in the book explicitly, but in one way or the other, all the little tidbits in there influence the story or the setting to some degree.
Summing it all up, when I’m done, I’ll have:
A chapter-by-chapter high-level overview of the novel
A more detailed synopsis for each chapter
A rich database of facts along with some drawings of maps and calculations and possibly a bunch of documents and spreadsheets
None of this is set in stone. Being agile is key. Not only do characters tend to have their own way and opinions about what I have in store for them, more often than not little details will surface that don’t make sense or are inconsistent, and replanning is required. Some of the above documents might start out pretty bare-boned and evolve as the story unfolds. But having a plan, however preliminary, gives me a direction, something to hold on to, while writing the first draft.
My spreadsheet of choice is LibreOffice Calc .
As an example, you can download the final story planning spreadsheet (warning: contains spoilers) I did for The Ein Particle .
Schedule: A big goal is just a series of small goals
Writing and publishing a novel is quite the Big Audacious Goal. By splitting it up in smaller steps, it becomes significantly less Big and Audacious and quite a bit more attainable. In the introduction, I’ve already split up the final goal — having published a novel — in six more manageable chunks. But each of these six can be further subdivided, so that I’ll end up with small weekly or daily goals that are guaranteed to be attainable. That way, I can forget about the big picture and concentrate on those details that are prudent to focus on at any given point in the process.
Setting up the schedule starts with jotting down a rough target word count. For sci-fi novels, 100k is a reasonable target. Going from that target word count for the entire first draft, it’s a matter of simple mathematics. I know what I am capable of, roughly, with respect to writing speed as measured in words per day. I’ve kept detailed daily logs of my writing efforts so far, so I have empirical data telling me that on average, I can manage 500 words a day. This takes into account days I am on fire and write a multiple of that, but also days I’m not feeling it or am just down with migraine, where I write significantly less. On a good day, I’ll do 2000 words. On a bad one, I’ll write none. Aiming for 500 a day is reasonable and realistic. Mind you, it’s still tough sometimes, and I’ll need to be disciplined to keep the average on that level. But again, having set the goal helps to focus and keep up the pace.
I’ll gather all this in a spreadsheet with two tabs. One tab for a rough monthly planning, another for the more detailed planning. In the weekly planning, I’ll note the target word count for that week and which chapters I am supposed to be working on for each week. At any time, I can open up this spreadsheet and at a glance determine whether I’m still on track to finish the first draft on time.
While writing the first draft, I will set regular intervals for going over the chapters written so far to clean up the worst typos and clunky phrasing, resolve any ambiguities or inconsistencies I can see at that point and just update what’s there already with any new insights I might have gotten from later chapters by that point.
When the first draft is done, I’ll schedule a few weeks to go over the entire manuscript again to clean it up a bit more. I’ll have a long list of notes of things I need to fix, add or expand upon, and this is when I will process those notes. This is high-level stuff, like adding some bits in one of the earlier chapters that will need to be established before we get to one of the later chapters.
What follows next is a series of editorial phases. I’ll dedicate an entire instalment in this series of blog posts to the finer details. For now, suffice to say that there will be three different editors, who will look at an ever increasing level of detail at the manuscript until it is ready for publication. Again, from experience (and by asking them) I’ll know roughly how much time they will need for their part, and can add that to the schedule. I always take into account a bit of back and forth as well, since any decent editor will do at least two passes.
Once I have my schedule settled, I’ll also contact those editors to see if they are available on the projected dates. Given that it takes me at least half a year to get to the second draft, they usually have time, but it is not uncommon for an editor to be booked fully a year ahead of time. If that happens, I need to either adjust the planning or look for an editor who is available at that time.
Finally, all the way at the end, I’ll schedule a few weeks for the actual publishing. This includes interior formatting. Both subjects will get their own instalment in this series, so let’s leave it at that for now.
While so far, all the scheduled activities are sequential, there is an important activity that happens in parallel: marketing (including commissioning the cover). There will be a separate post about the marketing process, so for now suppose it to say that there is some research that needs to happen, there are services that need to be booked in advance and obviously the cover must be ready by the time it’s time to publish.
As an example, you can download the schedule I created for the sequel to The Ein Particle . Note that the sequel does not have a title yet. The title usually only comes to me after the second or third draft. Until then, the book will go through life as simply ‘book 3’.
Finances
Remember those editors I mentioned in the previous section? They don’t work for free. In fact, editing comprises the bulk of the budget I’ll need to publish the book. But there are other costs as well, mostly related to marketing. Based on previous experience with my editors, I’ll do a budget estimation and I’ll add a rough estimate — again based on data from earlier projects and potential tweaks I want to make — of the marketing budget.
It’s pretty boring actually, and the result is just a simple tally.
The overall budget of a single 100k novel comes in at around SEK 100.000 (or around € 10.000 / US $ 10.000). Which is quite a hefty sum, and honestly, I need to look at ways to get that down. I know there are self-publishing authors who forego the editing or do it themselves. I am not a native speaker of the English language though. That is why I really value the professional input of my editors. And honestly, I value quality. There are too many books out there that are full of grammatical errors and clunky plots. That’s simply not my aspiration.
File Storage
As you may have gathered, even before I start writing I will have a bunch of documents and spreadsheets that I need to keep safe. It is also important for me to have access to those documents on multiple devices. While I have my writing setup, and prefer to work there, I also have a laptop and another machine in my home office (yes, the other home office, where I spend eight hours every weekday to do my day job).
I could use something like Google Docs of course, but I have moral objections to Google as a corporation. Besides, I don’t trust them — as you might have guessed if you’ve read my collection of novelettes and novellas, The Isolated Futures Omnibus .
For me, Nextcloud is the perfect solution. I have set up my own instance of Nextcloud on a server that lives in my own home. Since I’m a super-nerd it’s not much trouble for me to do so. For those who are not, there are also hosted services where everything is set up for you. There is a cost associated with those hosted services, but remember: if it’s free, you are the product.
Anyway. All my devices connect up to my Nextcloud server and sync the files back and forth. Every time I save my document, whether that’s a planning spreadsheet or the manuscript, the Nextcloud software on my device will copy the new version to the server. The server, meanwhile, will automatically keep track of older versions, just in case I accidentally delete a scene or chapter.
“ But Koen,” I hear you say. “What if your house burns down?”
Well, not a far-fetched risk. Like anywhere else in the world, at the time I’m writing this, we’re in the middle of a period of extreme drought, and I live smack in the middle of a forest. So that is why there are automatic daily backups of the files on my Nextcloud server to another server in a data centre somewhere in Germany. The backups are encrypted, so it doesn’t matter much where they are stored, as long as I can depend on them being around when I need them.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this first of six little insights in how I write my books. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I love hearing from my readers and I love learning from my fellow authors.
Keep an eye out for the next instalment that will cover writing the first draft.
