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are the names of their partners, their children? How do they relate to the other characters? There will of course be the throw away characters who all you need for at most is a name and description, but for anyone important you really need a lot of detail from the start so you don't end up with headaches later after you've realized that their eye color has changed six times over the course of the story.

You really won't know how many characters you need until you start planning the novel chapter by chapter. Of course start with the stories central figure and the central figures in their life, those will be obvious right from the beginning, but who else do you need? That's where plotting out the chapters in detail starts to pay off. You don't need chapter names, numbers are fine, what you do need are a start and end to the chapter and perhaps three or four points in between for simpler chapters. For really complex chapters you may well end up with a start, end and a dozen major points in between.

The key to planning out characters and chapters is to find a method that works for you. Some people will use a chart with stickers and lots of arrows to show where people come in and go out and to also show to direction of flow in the story itself. Others will just have an A4 page with a single line per chapter and the barest facts that they personally need. You may indeed find a way of doing this that is utterly unique to you. Do what you feel comfortable with.

The second to last step in preparing to actually get down to some serious writing is pinpointing locations and deciding precisely how they appear and how to describe them. A location is anywhere you place a character so you can well imagine the diversity possible. Think of your favorite book and think of all the locales the hero finds themselves in. Cars, planes, trains, restaurants, theaters, schools, hospitals and all the rest. Make them consistent and if they're real world locations make sure you research them.

That leads nicely to the last step, research. Alright so you're thinking "But this is a fictional work surely I can make it up?" and yes a lot of it you can. But I can promise you that any truly amazing work of fiction you have ever read that really blew your mind away was also a thoroughly researched work. I will give two good examples.

First say you're male or have never had children and you have to describe various stages of a pregnancy that a character is going through. Do you know at what point the

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