Starting a Project

This is one of those topics that can only apply to the way I work as a writer at a given time. This method may not work for you, and in fact it may not work for me next year. But right now it seems to be how my brain wants to write a novel.

There's a general rule of thumb that a successful project takes 60-70% of the time in the planning phase and 30-40% of the time in the execution phase. That means a good project takes twice as long to plan as it does to implement.

The same pretty much holds true of writing a romance novel, I think. If I take the time to plan the story before I start writing scenes, I'll be less likely to have to go back and rewrite a bunch of pages because I didn't understand where I was going when I wrote them in the first place.

This turned out to be true in spades when I wrote IN TOO DEEP (which became DEAD RECKONING, Silhouette Bombshell, July 2006). That novel had very little planning upfront, and I spent a good 6 months writing pages that ended up unused. I redefined the premise four times. I worked without a synopsis for a long time. It took me a year to develop a manuscript that should have taken about four months.

For those of you who can write by the seat of your pants, more power to you! I wish I had that capability. However, I don't, so here's how I do my 60-70% of planning before ever writing a single scene:

• Define the germ
• Discover the characters
• Define the goals
• Define the conflict
• Write a throwaway scene or two
• Sketch the working synopsis
• Sketch out the scenes