Today is the day for that! Time to take everything from these last two days and combine it all together. Are you ready? Do you know your characters? And your plot? You better, because now all that's left is to jump in.
First thing's first, open a new document in Word. Save it as the working title of the book, and save it somewhere safe, where you'll know where it is.
In that document, make a new page for every section in your book:
-Cover
-Title Page
-Dedication
-Chapters (You should know how many chapters you need based on your plot outline on Day 1)
If you have other parts you want, like prologues, epilogues, forewords, etc, add those in too. These are just the bits I needed.
Now, if you look on your Word screen, in the bottom right corner, you should see a few little buttons. These are "views", and they help a lot for what I'm about to show you.
The third button from the left is "Outline View". Click it.
I like to use Outline View to keep myself a little more organized than I would with regular pages. (Print View) It takes a few minutes to totally figure out, but it really is useful. My book has "parts" to it. The POV switches between characters a few times. So I make the Part titles Level One, the chapters Level Two, and then the text for the chapters is Body Text. (At the top left is a little scroll box and some arrows. The double arrows take you to level one and body text, and the single arrows push you forward and back a level.)
Of course, if you don't really like Outline View, you can use whatever works.
Anyway, next is the easiest (or hardest) part of the process; fill in the blanks. You know the working title already, so fill that in. Do the title page, dedication, and all the other easy pages first. Once you have all that done, you can move on to the story itself!
The hardest part (for me, anyway) comes next. Getting through the first couple chapters. Because you know the story already, the exposition (I just love that word!) and setting up is the boring part. That's why you quit so fast. You're aching to write the exciting part, where all the twists and turns start coming. You worry that the story won't be sellable with what you've got so far. But don't think that. What you're doing right now is just the first draft. Get it all the way done, and then go back and make it sellable.
By the way, I want to give a huge thanks to Diana Scimone, even though I doubt she'll see it. She's the one who inspired me to start this novel-in-thirty-days idea. She did something very similar, and a lot of these tips come from her blog, so go check it out!
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