Simple answer no. But it can dramatically improve the result and the time it takes you to finish your dream novel. Here is why.
First of all, many writers struggle sitting in front of that blank white paper. How to start? How to finish? And what about the 80.000 words in-between? But those are only a few of probably hundreds of questions.
We won’t answer all of them here. Instead, we are going to cover some of the most important aspects in this blog post.
Having an idea at least partly fleshed out will help you getting started. That’s the certain part. Very soon, though, you may notice something else is missing. What exactly that could be – as always – depends on what exactly you are writing. But most of the time a great cast is as important as a nice ensemble of locations or settings.
There are certain rules for what exactly a great cast needs but that’s not for today. Let’s start easy and – most importantly – without strict boundaries. Let’s just say you need at least a couple of characters. Some main characters, some supporting characters. Probably a sidekick. That’s it for the start.
Now, there are two problems with these. First: You need to develop them. Unless you are happy with the first iteration of a character once it comes to your mind, you need to make sure they fit your story. Idealy, they complement each other. That alone does in most cases require quite a bit of planning. Sure, you can do that on the fly but don’t forget, there are some 10.000 words you need to juggle as well when writing your novel.
Long story short: The more you know your characters ahead of time and the better you’ve laid them out, the quicker you can write your novel. You’ll save time you’d otherwise spend going back and forth, changing who they fit into your story.
The other issue
The other issue is that you need to keep all those little details in your mind throughout the whole writing process. Why? Because your readers notice when you mix their hair colors up. When their characterization doesn’t match anymore with who they were 3 chapters ago. How exactly did you spell their surname? That sister you only mentioned one time – about 200 pages ago. Have you drawn her smaller or taller than your hero?
Now here is the good news. There are no rules as to how deep you have to plan your characters or locations. Or even whether you need to at all. But we ran into the same two issues we described earlier during our own writing over the years. And we built a solution for those right into Untold Novel.
You can use Untold Novel to not only craft (in-)credible characters but also remember all those little details. Even better, we built a nice User Interface that guides you through many important aspects, so you don’t have to start at a blank page. Untold Novel offers various fields asking for things like Eye color, size and weight, piercings & tattoos, skin color, heritage, characteristics, motivation, goal in story, marital status, partner, ex-partner and children, good and bad habits and many more.
Why not use a map?
But that’s not all. As we already mentioned locations: For these we not only thought about a name and address but also let you add an icon, decide whether it is a crime scene or tourist attraction (or both, who knows), its style, atmosphere and topography.
And finally to the highlight: You can view all your locations on a real map and see how far they are apart from each other. And there is even another step: LookAround aka StreetView. Drop right onto the streets of your locations and see what the neighborhood has in store.
So our final verdict is this: Writing a novel does not require a plan – but having one can dramatically improve your experience writing your dream novel.
