Miles By Design

You have your idea. Yay!

But the hard work doesn't stop there. Now you need to flesh out this initial concept with a plot and start to think about the world and more importantly the characters that will inhabit it.

That is not to say that you have to have every character and their back-story figured out before you put pen to paper or fingers to keys, but it is good to have a basic knowledge of your main protagonist or protagonists.

When I started fleshing out the main plot points for 'Heroes of Terisca', I realised that the contents would have be split into a series of books. This is another thing to start contemplating. Is your book going to be a standalone novel or is it going to be a continuing saga?

To pad out the plot I made a chart in Microsoft excel and then wrote where I wanted the story to start and how I wanted book 1 to end. Then I inserted rows into the middle when I thought of more plot points to move the story along.

This chart was invaluable when I started writing, it kept me on target and although sometimes when writing tangents appear that you did not expect, the chart helped to bring me back to the core of the tale.