Easy. Start with an understanding of the market.
A scary business
Writing books is a scary business, but the most fearsome elements of the whole game are: it is very easy to make a complete mess of the entire project before writing your first word. You can misjudge the market. You can dirty your intrigue. You may have an irremediable knowledge of your characters or the world they are in. If you make a mistake at the beginning, you go directly to a giant disaster.
Planning is therefore important. At the same time, any form of creative writing needs a kind of fluency. It is simply not possible to plan a thing completely. On the one hand, it is difficult to crush all his inventiveness in the three month period he has assigned. On the other hand, the writing process will give you more information about your characters and your story, and you should give yourself space to respond to these ideas.
The seat of your pants
There is no single way to address these problems. I know an author who wrote so many notes when it came to investigating his first novel that the notes ended up being longer than the book itself. I also know an excellent author (one of whose books has been widely promoted on television and has sold a large number of copies) that has exactly the opposite approach. She likes to investigate a period, be interested in certain aspects of it, then start writing. she barely knows her character and knows nothing about the story; She just opens the door and waits to see what will happen. Other commercially successful authors work similarly.
Therefore, there are different paths you can take, but most new writers who take one of these more extreme paths will regret it. If you are an extreme note-taker, honestly ask yourself if your book needs more research or if you simply postpone it. You may be afraid to start, which is a perfectly understandable fear that should only be cured in one way and only one way: get caught. As Kingsley Amis put it very well, "the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of your pants on the seat of your chair." There may be a little more than that, but it's still lesson one, the only lesson that doesn't tolerate exceptions.
Similarly, if you are attracted to the vigor and audacity of the "newly started" approach, ask yourself if, in fact, you are not afraid to plan disciplines, if not. fear because they are precisely what you need most. It is possible that, without planning anything, write a wonderful novel, appear on television and sell millions of copies, but statistically, it is much more likely to end with manuscripts impossible to sell, most of whose failures were completely predictable from the beginning.
Chasing Kay Scarpetta
So suppose you are convinced of the idea of planning things to some extent (not obsessive). Where to start Inevitably you start where you expect to end: in a bookstore. A bookstore is not just a repository of all the greatest fiction and nonfiction in the world; It is also a market and a gateway.
You have to learn to read wisely, commercially. Say, for example, that you intend to write a criminal fiction. He may have a weakness for British detective fiction of the "golden age." You like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Bulldog Drummond, the "Santa" and everything else. Then you want to do something similar. Something with a modern environment, of course, but nevertheless a novel that prepares the same attractive mix of a comfortable life, shared social values, amateur detective, decent but clumsy cops and a good touch of high-class life. Then you do it. You are writing this book. It has strong characters, warm prose and an intelligent plot, although artificial. (Artifice is part of the sensation). You can very well produce a manuscript that perfectly achieves your goals.
And it will never be sold. Perhaps, in truth, if the book was good enough, I could find a second level editor to eliminate it by a very small advance. Likely, it will even attract a great publisher by launching the book in the comfortable crime market, where it can aim to sell 5 or 10,000 paperback books and little hope of entering a market. abroad. But you
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