Good Spiraling: Conscientiously Add Ideation and Feedback to Write Better Novels

Every novelist faces the same tradeoff: quality against time. Our answer is spiral development, a conscientious writing process built on three interlocking steps: ideation, writing, and feedback. Iterating through these steps in successive loops will produce a compelling novel more efficiently. So, make sure to integrate time for both ideation and feedback at regular intervals into your process.

Today's post concentrates on improving your writing process, addressing the tradeoff that all novelists face: quality against time. We offer two main points: first, noveling, if that's a word, has a relatively well-defined goal: to write a hundred thousand coherent words. You may recall our initial definition of coherence: a novel's words combine to produce a wonderful reading experience, much like the gears in an old-fashioned pocket watch work together to tell time. Next, we leap from this insight to a more effective writing process, called spiral development. Put simply, it involves iterating through loops of ideation, writing, and feedback as you come closer and closer to a perfected manuscript. Doing spiral development conscientiously helps resolve the tradeoff between quality and time. We will conclude with two insights you can immediately apply to your writing.

Quality, as Ford's ads used to say, is job one. Rather than sloganeering, Bardsy supplies an extensive vision for great novels. Aligning your 100,000 or so words with this ideal leads to happy readers. On the other hand, missing, underdeveloped, or ill-fitting elements, i.e. a lack of coherence, leads to an unsatisfying reading experience and a novel that won't do well in a competitive market.

Quality has an overlooked side benefit. Believing in your work's quality boosts your self-confidence. Promotion almost always involves meeting people to talk about your story. While public speaking is the bane of many writers, knowing without doubt that your story pleases readers makes this task much easier. More broadly, the confidence certainty brings makes it more likely you will invest sufficient time and money in promoting your work.

Quality takes time. You can't rush perfection, but everyone should try to accelerate their process. Why? Because writing careers require many novels. Estimates of how long it takes to produce a polished manuscript range from six months, which may zero out other life goals, up to eighteen months, a long time for avid fans to wait. With sufficient craft, including appropriate use of tools and feedback as we will discuss, you should produce one quality novel a year from scratch. Then, we recommend actively working on three projects: one in development, one in writing, and one in promotion.

Efficiency translates to writing novels quickly while maintaining quality. That said, efficiency is very much secondary. Much better to produce one great novel every few years than a string of crap. The best of both worlds comes from enhancing your process. Let's focus on two insights in this regard.

Here is a basic tenet: everyone knows roughly what a novel should look like. It's a hundred thousand words, plus or minus. Bardsy's approach elaborates on this point, detailing exactly what compelling novels include. To take an obvious example, your novel needs the five story elements: character, world, conflict, theme, and plot. Reaching this goal sounds easy, right? Yes and no. The key to turning those words into a story is that every piece, including the five elements, has to be fully developed and work together to provide a happy reading experience. Think of a pocket watch.

Opening a pocket watch reveals an intricate mechanism: gears, escapements, and springs packed into a very tight space. More importantly, these parts fit together precisely to tell time. Should one part break, the entire mechanism grinds to a halt; the watch is broken, literally only working twice a day. Novels are arguably similar. A few minor mistakes may not do enough damage to make the reader unhappy, but past some point the reader gives up and moves on to a more rewarding work. In sum, your novel's parts must cohere, telling a story in words, to win devoted fans.

Spiral development is a term engineers use that adapts well to producing novels, especially achieving coherence. This model centers on iteration, which should sound familiar. Authors necessarily iterate; we write successive drafts that get better and better until the novel is done. Now, let's examine what happens at each stage more carefully. Each draft depends on three interrelated steps: first, ideation, which is a sophisticated way to say thought; second, writing, naturally; and, third, feedback. Feedback, which can come from your authorial reflection or from others, assesses writing to identify what works and what doesn't, given the "happy reader" ideal.

This setup should make the one point obvious: ideation and feedback are as important as writing. Efficiency aside, producing a quality novel demands both. Absent ideation, writing tends to be linear, at best, or incoherent, at worst. The so-called pantser (or gardener) serves as an example of what not to do; supposedly, they put little thought into what they write. Pantsing can only end in two ways. Either the author will revise the last draft into a coherent manuscript or their stream of consciousness will fail to please readers. All writers do some thinking, so this dichotomy oversimplifies. Nevertheless, sporadic thought is not enough. Ideation needs to be fully integrated into your process.

The same goes for feedback, which parallels thinking in that everyone recognizes its import. Again, however, it needs to be systematically integrated into your process. Overall, then, good noveling looks like this:

Thus, successful writing calls for a loop where writing, ideation, and feedback continually feed each other. Thought leads to writing, which leads to feedback, which leads to more thought and, then, more writing and so on.

Crucially (and thankfully), this cycle ends. Here's the payoff: when looked at from the side and over time, your writing process should look like this:

The spiral image above shows the process loop repeated over time. The effort swings from ideation to writing to feedback, leading to the next loop. With enough thought and good feedback, each draft improves, meaning the loops get smaller. Put another way, each iteration gets closer to the goal. Hence, the narrowing spiral: the process zeros in on a coherent novel.

Of course, sometimes the writing process gets messy or inspiration may strike, causing the loop's diameter to increase. Overall, though, big changes tend to occur at the beginning of a project with smaller ones coming at the end, creating this pattern. From another angle, noveling isn't an aimless process; it's conscientious and directed. You know the goal and keep at it, coming closer and closer until you succeed and have the fabulous novel on the right. Spiraling is an apt metaphor for an effective writing process. Let's consider two of this metaphor's implications.

The most important lesson: time spent thinking, which includes using tools like Bardsy's, is as important as time spent writing. We've heard authors boast of writing ten thousand words a week, which is great. However, that's not the goal. The goal is a coherent novel. Quality requires ideation, which takes time and effort, sometimes more than actually typing. To throw out a number, a thousand quality words may be worth as much or more than five thousand typed less rigorously. So, give yourself credit for time spent thinking and planning.

That same premium on thinking carries into a second lesson on trust. It can be hard to trust yourself specifically to know when your work is good enough or done. Take heart! In our experience, it's extremely rare for a serious writer to make gross errors in judgment. The ones we do see generally stem from arrogance, as we've discussed elsewhere. So long as you honestly adopt the reader's perspective, you should be able to determine what adds value and where your writing falls short. At the same time, you should also regularly seek feedback from others where your own reflection falls short. To conclude, adding regular feedback and regular ideation to your writing process produces better novels more efficiently.

We look forward to your thoughts or questions at joinus@bardsy.com.