Practical Method For Writing A Novel or Screenplay

Indexé : 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]People mystify the process of writing novels or feature length screenplays as though it's this magical thing that just happens. But in fact, writing a novel or writing a feature length screenplay is really about craft in the same way that you build a table or bake a pie. That means understanding a process that you can use and repeat for each novel that you're working on, each screenplay that you're working on. First of all, you need to know that there are basically four steps in the process. You can find that in my free story planning guide that is available for download. Just take a look in the description below this video to find a link to that. The first step in writing a novel is to create a world building document. And a world building document is about combining all those elements that are in your head onto a piece of paper that you don't even organize at first. You're not thinking about the story structure or how the story is going to unfold. You're just kind of throwing out those things that you know about the story world, about the characters in that world, about the laws of that world, about the magic system of that world, whatever you have. That's all just goes in your world building document in order to set the stage for the next part, which is to then begin to organize that in a way which constructs the core conflict of your story in something called a logline. A logline is really just like a single sentence or two sentences that describes the core conflict of your story, the key protagonist of your story, and some aspect of them that is a flaw that will prevent them from solving the problem of the story. A PTSD suffering plumber has to go into a haunted sewer pipe in order to stop it from being taken over by giant mushroom people. Next, you need to work out the story beats and you do a beat sheet that works its way through using a three-act structure that understands that things happen in a certain order that builds in rising action. And then finally, you create either a story treatment if you're writing a screenplay or you create a chapter by chapter outline if you're writing a novel. And each of those chapters has to do specific things and you put those in your chapter by chapter outline. They need to have a problem that they're trying to solve in the chapter. They need to have a reversal in the chapter. When you get to the point of writing your novel, then you've already laid out and worked through all the potential problems that you're going to face. You're stress testing your story and you've broken it down into bite-size pieces that you can write one after another so that you're not trying to write a whole novel, you're trying to write a series of chapters which are each like a short story and then it becomes possible to do it. If you have any questions, leave them down below. Any comments, feel free to add them. I hope that helps you on your writer journey.