Getting your first draft written is a major strategic goal in writing your novel. But how do you get there? You need what I call a "creative paradigm" -- a method for doing your creative work. Creation tends to be messy and chaotic and hard. Your first draft is all about creation. Once you've got your first draft written, you'll be able to focus on editing, which is a whole other game. But you'll never have anything to edit until you've first created it, so in this article, let's worry only about the creative part. When I was writing my book, WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, my editor believed that there is one best creative paradigm to get that first draft done. She thought it was "obvious" that you should write an outline first, then write your novel sticking tightly to the outline. If that were the only possible creative paradigm, a lot of great books would never have been written. Plenty of authors simply can't write a novel from an outline. Their brains aren't wired that way. In my book, I identified four common creative paradigms for getting to that first draft. Here they are:
This E-zine is copyright Randall Ingermanson, 2012.
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