by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 01, 2009   Last Updated: May 03, 2009

Writing a book is a major project. Depending on how much time you have it can take months to put down a first draft and even more months to complete the editing and first draft. This means that if you want to complete this project just like any other you are going to need a plan. This plan should be adjusted to your own writing style but there are a few steps that will help outline that plan.

Before you can even create a true plan you need to know your resources. In the case of writing your most major resource is time. There are two easy ways to measure your writing, you can do it by time, or you can do it by word/page count. Each has advantages over the other.

Setting a timer and writing that long each day is useful if you have a true time crunch. You know that after the twenty minutes you are done. This can be a problem though for people who have trouble sitting down and beginning because it is easy to delay for twenty minutes and end up with nothing on the page.

The second possibility is word count, deciding to write a specific amount of words every day. This can be much harder on people with limited time because the amount of time it takes to write 1000 words can vary widely from day to day. On Monday the thousand words may take fifteen minutes and on Thursday it could take four hours. No matter if you choose a timer or word count though make certain to stick to it. It has to be a commitment or it doesn't mean anything.

Once you know how much time you'll want to consider the other basics. Where you want to write, how you want to write and what you want to write. These points are personal and something that you will need to experiment with. The important point of all of them is to find a routine and ensure that you stick to it. Once you have the time and the place you need to break down the writing into the basic processes. This is plotting, writing and editing and each of these become far easier if you have a plan, any plan.

Plotting your story and characters is the beginning of the formulation of the plan for any novel. No matter how seat of the pants your writing style you will want to spend some time on this process. Yet just sitting and thinking about the story isn't useful. Instead, you need to plan, and there are some basic rules for this plan.

One of the most important thing to consider is how many major characters you can have. The shorter the work the less you can explore the characters. This means that a truly short story can only have one major character

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