Prepping Your Novel

Earlier this week, I wrote about the “Chinese” method of novel writing, which is all about doing all the hard creative work first and then a quick-breezy approach to your first draft. The key here, of course, is plotting out your novel/story in advance so that you don’t have to worry about it later, and while that seems simple enough in theory, in reality plotting itself can often be a weird alchemical process.

Each writer has their own way of plotting that works for them, and often they must...