A review by jwells
Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure by Janice Hardy

informative inspiring

5.0

I have read a ton of writing books, and this one is excellent. It doesn't even take for granted what stage your book idea is at:  Do you want to write but don’t have an idea? Or you have a vague idea, but don't know how to develop it? And then she helps you move to the next stage. How do you get an idea if you don’t have one? How do you develop an idea into a premise? Or take a story premise and create a book outline? Or, decide how much of a book outline you need versus how much of your book you want to discovery write?

This is how you avoid staring at a blank page, or getting stuck after 50 pages, or in my case, writing an entire novel draft only to find that it doesn’t work, and I can’t figure out why…

At every stage she acknowledges that there are multiple different ways to do things, no one right way to write a book.  This is very refreshing.  By the end, if you do all the exercises, you have a detailed synopsis or a basic outline of major plot points, which is a comfort for a writer like me. Or, if you want to discovery write, you can stop before you get to the final workshop. Stop when you feel ready to writing, then come back and do workshop 10 when you are revising and need to figure out structure.

The discussion of POV and narrative distance is particularly good. Nice and clear with examples. Many writing books don’t tackle narrative distance, and those that do, sometimes make it sound “hard” or advanced.

As a long time follower of Hardy's Fiction University blog, can I just add that... we got to see the end of the Bob and Sally zombie story, which she has used as a goofy plotting example for years. LOL