6 Steps Writers Need to Tame the Story Beast

by D.E. Ireland, @DEIrelandAuthor

If you’ve come with up a unique idea for a book, congratulations. But you may need advice on how to shepherd this idea from that first inspiration to typing the last line of your final draft. Here are six steps that can help you along the way.

1. First you need a light bulb moment. An idea pops in your brain, you say, “what if…?” and off you go to develop the premise. It’s perhaps the most exciting part of writing. Then reality sets in. We came up with the novel idea of Eliza Doolittle solving mysteries with Henry Higgins. But we first had to ascertain whether Shaw’s characters were in the public domain (yes, thankfully) and steer clear of Lerner & Loewe’s film My Fair Lady, which isn’t.

2. Write down that premise before the idea floats away. Otherwise another writer will eventually pluck it out of the ethereal domain and make it their own. Discuss it to death if you have a writing or critique partner. Is it workable, or the stupidest thing you’ve ever come up with in your career? Writing hours are precious, so don’t waste time on an idea that will end up going nowhere. We knew Eliza and Higgins would be an entertaining pair of amateur sleuths, and that London in 1913 would make it even better. We just needed a plot, murder victims, red herrings, clues, and suspects. Oh, and a killer with a motive.

3. Expand the premise into a paragraph or a page. Let your creative juices flow. If you aren’t in a writing team, find someone who can act as a sounding board. Not your children, your mother, or your spouse. You don’t need a yes-man, you need another writer who understands the process of fleshing out a story. We (the first time working as D.E. Ireland) spent days going over story possibilities, and then another few weeks reading and rereading G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion along with countless hours researching Edwardian London.

4. After a month or two of brainstorming, you should be ready to outline. We’ve both written books by the seat of our pants and it can be an exhilarating process. Other times, it feels like you’re driving across the country without a map or highway signs to give you any direction. And you may end up in a roadside pit of despair. Not having an outline can seriously prolong the writing of the manuscript – something you can’t afford when working on deadline.

As for the outline’s length, at least ten to fifteen pages are average – although the outline for our second book clocked in at twenty-eight pages single-spaced! If you can’t wring out at least ten pages for the outline, then the plot is short story material, not a novel.

An outline is a great opportunity to throw down everything possible about the plot. Better to have too much story than not enough. And keep in mind most mystery editors prefer 85,000 words or around 315 pages max. So a fifty-page outline may be telling you that the story idea is better suited for a saga like Outlander or Game of Thrones. Our outline for Wouldn’t It Be Deadly was eighteen pages, which translated into a twenty-page synopsis for our proposal package. However, we nabbed our agent with a one-paragraph query three hours after sending it off. And he roped in a 2-book contract within three weeks. Nice.

5. After the outline, we hammered out the first draft of Book One more slowly, due to other projects and life in general. Although we sold the manuscript quickly, we still had a final draft to complete. Once we turned it in, our editorial revisions were easy and few. Then again, we both have editing experience and are grammar and spelling Nazis, as well as research hounds.

For our second Eliza Doolittle/Henry Higgins book, we managed to get the entire first draft done between late January and late April – pushing ourselves to finish before we left for Malice Domestic in early May. Then came revisions, far more painful this time due to the necessity of cutting 50 pages before we began editing. Ouch. Sometimes you have to let certain things go.

6. Final revision time is like dress rehearsal. Is everything working: lines, costumes, the performances of your characters. We exchange chapters to read over, using ‘track changes’ in Word. Eventually we agree on a final draft. Done? Hardly. Reading the manuscript aloud is a handy but invaluable device, and takes another week to finish. But we catch plenty of extra spaces, punctuation fails, awkward phrases, and misspellings. We take turns reading two pages at a time, which seemed the best length for our read-throughs. A whole chapter proved too exhausting both to read and to listen to for the other partner. We often take breaks, hours or days between, just to keep our sanity intact.

Only then do we attach it to an email and send it off to the editor. There is always a day or two of sheer relief at having survived the process of completing our contract without murdering each other. But we can’t wait to begin again… after a small break, of course. And we have the six steps to help us along the way.

 D.E. Ireland is a team of award-winning authors, Meg Mims and Sharon Pisacreta.

Long time friends, they decided to collaborate on this unique series based on George Bernard Shaw’s wonderfully witty play, Pygmalion, and flesh out their own version of events post-Pygmalion.  You can find them on:
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