About Your First Novel & Inspirations
Haisam Elkewidy
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- About Your First Novel & Inspirations - June 27, 2015
Novels are a great way of conveying incredible storytelling to many readers. Authors usually pour in ideas to create dramatic situations, with amazing characters that go through various, unique hardships that define them and allow readers to relate to them better. But have you ever wondered what it’s like to actually write a novel? Writing novels, as it turns out, has a barebones process that, while not typically formulaic, usually lays the foundation for setting up a novel’s path from outlining the basic ideas, to finalizing the whole story in full detail. The following article will try to outline how a writer should go about beginning to set up, and eventually writing, a novel. A sequential procedure is listed, with each step explained in grand detail and with recommendations on how to go by them.
Depending on the genre you are writing in, a great novel is centralized around a main idea, or ideas. This inspiration typically serves as a focal point for that novel, or series of novels, and becomes the basis for its world building, its characters, and often times even the conflicts that occur between said characters and environments. The most important thing about inspiration, is that it has to emotionally stimulate you to where you would be excited to write about it. Novels will generally play around the combination of more than one idea in unorthodox ways, but if you look deeply enough you should be able to point out the central idea upon which the whole novel is based off.
It is then critical for the writer to begin to expand upon these ideas once they have been established. If they set up the setting within which the story takes place, the writer then begins to put characters in this world that will live through it, and share experiences in it, akin to us having experiences in our own world. The characters should also be interacting with each other just like we do on a daily basis. These interactions create drama, tension, conflict, and moments that spark up all the action that occurs in the story. The fine details are usually what the readers go after and, if they’re written well enough, they could be cemented into their minds well beyond finishing reading the novel itself.
With all the elements in place, it is now time to flesh the rest of the details out. This includes the chronological sequence of events in the plot, scenes/interactions involving characters, the motivations behind said characters, the implications of these events on them and on the setting, and much more. It should be noted that, depending on how much time you spend on these details, there are a nearly infinite amount of elements to consider in any story, or franchise. Many examples of stories with incredible amounts of detail include George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, or Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, in comparison to shorter stories such as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Once you have all this in place, all you have to do is write it. The amount of depth and detail the story goes into, ultimately depends on the writer.
And speaking of writers, Haisam Elkewidy is an Egyptian-American Petroleum Engineering senior at Texas A&M University, who is also an aspiring novelist. Holon Publishing, a publishing startup in Indiana, is so interested in getting his first book published under them, that they are trying to acquire funds via Kickstarter to do so. You now have the opportunity to help assist this company in funding an Egyptian- American project by going to
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/holonpublishing/publish-the-wailing-waters-usher-in-a-new-era-of-s
If you pledge 25 dollars to the website, you will get a copy of the book with free shipping once it is finally published. This is an incredible opportunity to help an Egyptian-American writer get out into the market, and he would greatly appreciate it if he had your support!
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