Stop Writing in a Straight Line: The Power of Nonlinear Novel Development

Traditional "blueprint" methods often lead to costly end-stage revisions. By treating story development as an ongoing process and integrating external feedback chapter-by-chapter (iteration), authors can align their vision with reader expectations in real-time, which also effectively eliminates the need for expensive developmental editing.

Novel writing often follows a linear path: idea, drafts, developmental editing, revision, and proofreading. Conventional advice, often embedded as "blueprints," "templates," or programmatic guides, typically reinforces this mono-directional tendency. Worse, some offer a tantalizing prospect: complete a novel in ninety days or whatever, but fall short. In actuality, linearity hurts your work and wastes effort. Instead, adopt a nonlinear writing process. Specifically, we recommend a continuous interplay between story development and writing. We also suggest integrating feedback into your process from the beginning, centering on iterating through one chapter at a time. Shifting your process to include these two steps, along with reasonable foresight and proper planning, ensures your novel will deliver a compelling story in roughly 100,000 words.

Of course, writers are idiosyncratic; every author has a unique process. Further, no one benefits from forcing naturally "left-handed" writers to become "right-handed." Still, we share a common goal: satisfying readers and thereby selling books. Our non-linear approach stems from working backward from that consensus to uncover its implications for writing processes. It, taken with a healthy dose of pragmatism, leads to better awareness, more productivity, and better books.

Authors can and should distinguish story development from writing. Development means conceptualizing your story while transmission means putting that story into words. Though they should interact and overlap in execution, as we'll discuss, seeing them as distinct tasks encourages you to be conscious of their interplay and allocate time to both, especially development. Better authors constantly switch modes, thinking about story, on the one hand, and writing, on the other. It's harder than it sounds. More linear authors tend to concentrate on daily word counts and leave the story to fend for itself. It is essential to set aside time for perfecting your story long before the end of your writing process. In addition, don't confuse story development with planning. To plan connotes an isolated early stage; development, in contrast, is an ongoing process.

Going back and forth between writing and development produces a more coherent product. Each of its five elements (characters, world, conflict, theme, and plot) is fully developed, synergizes and the story has an inciting incident, peak and resolution. Crucially, more interaction means more flexibility, not rigidity. The overriding priority is to bring the story and writing into perfect alignment, quickly adjusting one or the other when needed. You will see how this approach encourages creativity by immediately incorporating new ideas into the evolving project. When done properly, this approach dramatically reduces the need for final revision and removes developmental editing expenses.

Feedback is vital -- duh! Yet, linear writing processes only admit it in one place, usually near the very end. Imagine you're crafting a chair or making pasta sauce. Continuous evaluation, either with your tastebuds or a ruler, keeps you on track. Neither carpenter nor cook would wait until the end to assess the angle of a joint or the need for salt. As the end of a writing project nears, changes become increasingly costly, especially in terms of coherence. Identifying and addressing issues more immediately makes for a smoother journey and a happier author. And that means regularly seeking feedback.

Some feedback comes in the form of your inner voice. You already reread each chapter after you complete a draft. to see whether it includes the necessary plot, character growth, and so forth. However, your inner voice only goes so far. Remember, our approach calls for knowing your story. Such familiarity means your mind fills in missing pieces in ways readers can't. Thus, you must rely on reader-volunteers to check your and guarantee they get the story. Keep this in mind: an inability to figure out what's going on invites readers to give up, put the book aside, and never finish (DNF). Muy mal! Early confusion is fatal because it compounds. So, the most important chapter to test is your first; after all, it launches the book and should serve as a marketing sample.

Just as we break novels into chapters to make it easy to digest, so too should we test chapter by chapter. Testing a whole novel at once overloads your or any evaluator's capabilities. Chapters must be satisfying in their own right while leaving the reader wanting more. Every chapter must deliver on the novel's value, as well: genre, character, and your unique bonus. That's a lot to look at -- way too much to check at once for each of a novel's 30 or more chapters. Don't go nuts. Every sentence doesn't need a careful look, far from it. Still, each chapter will need a quick holistic appraisal from an actual reader. Only then can you confidently add it to your novel.

For the most part, this testing should go well and identify minor issues. Remember, story development and your inner voice has done most of the heavy lifting. If you're really off track, it's time to reassess your whole process, not jump to narrow rewrites. For example, when the volunteer's retelling describes a story radically different from the one in your head. Like inspiration, when retelling pinpoints an issue, you should go back to the overall narrative to determine how much should change and revise accordingly. Use this technique to iterate through each chapter until you're confident they meet their objectives.

Concentrating on the first chapter, the story's peak and the final chapter offers a pragmatic way to integrate feedback and iterate. Put another way, prioritize testing and evolving these crucial components. Then, count on the framework, Bardsy's tools, to harmonize them. This toolkit combines effective chapters into a compelling novel. Your novel, for instance, must deliver resonant character arcs as well as a thematic bang. Even if an evaluator identifies an overall problem in these chains, they'd have tremendous difficulty pinpointing which link is at fault. Instead, the goal is to build and test each link and rely on other techniques to make sure they properly connect from beginning to end.

Overall, interaction and iteration translate to steadier progress and less need for back-end work. Chapters do what they need to while the tools make sure they synergize. Done properly, the penultimate draft won't need major revisions or developmental edit. Only then should you happily line edit to your heart's content. With the support of good tooling, integrating interaction and iteration will give you the power to produce a satisfying novel and please your readers.