Sometimes I get asked by my partner how I get the idea for a fiction novel. Does it just pop into my head when I wake up? Do I steal the idea from something I’ve watched? Do I just write down my dreams? Do I write what I’ve experienced?

The creative process is fluid, and it’s different going person to person. I don’t believe there is a single answer to “how does one begin a novel?” as there’s numerous ways to go about it. Some works are just a rehashing of more ancient tales told in the modern sense, some are heavily influenced by older work, some write a nuanced semi-biographical story of their life, some just have long, detailed dreams that connect into one larger storyline. 

Anachronistic novel prompts

Some writers start a novel with an ending or scene already in mind and write anachronistically backwards to where the story begins and how these characters ended up in these situations.

The pros of this are that you have a clear, linear understanding of the plot and you’re able to use literary techniques like foreshadowing, red herring, symbolism, or allegory with flawless continuity, as you already know where everything is leading and thus, have better memory to commit to when setting up your initial scenes.

The cons are that sometimes the story ends up contrived and limited. Instead of there being an endless free flow of ideas, you’ve instead tied your story and plotline to a fixed point in time. You aren’t giving the story a fair chance to grow and develop naturally, so your Acts I & II, your rising actions, run the risk of reading more like a prequel than anything. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as there have been successful prequels, but ask anyone and they will tell you prequels are very hard to write, and you don’t want your own novel, the current and most significant storyline to be harder to write than it is. 

My first novel, A Lyrical Soul, had been written this way. My rich and beloved “Chapter 17” of that book was the very first thing that was written, or at least the vague idea of a student (Vincent) and teacher (Mr. Yinsen) watching a sunset in the woods while discussing their philosophy of life. The entire basis of the novel was set up to bring Mr. Yinsen and Vincent together for that single moment of clarity, so everything before this climax is setting up a parallel narrative between how Mr. Yinsen and Vincent were going about their lives up to that point in time. 

Having a positive, peculiar, and philosophical mentor figure is by and large my favorite trope in all of fiction, as it is one of those character-driven relationships that are easy to love, insightful to know more about, and set up for some very wacky situations. 

Examples include Mr. Keating & Neil from Dead Poets Society, Sean Maguire & Will Hunting from Good Will Hunting, Ruben Stone & Joe from The Sound of Metal, Takuan & Musashi from Vagabond, Melchizedek & Santiago from The Alchemist, Gloria & Koumail from A Time of Miracles, Iroh & Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, there’s thousands more I could pull from. I’ll write a blog on this trope as well later on. 

Mentor figures are an endless and reliable bastion of fiction, and yet I fear we don’t always see this trope as much as we should. A lot of these represent the sort of mentorship opportunities I wish I had once gotten in my life, and a lot of the characters I’ve written, including and most especially Vincent Young, are benefactors of the opportunities I never got.

Starting from scratch

Maybe you don’t have a specific scene or dynamic your story is working toward, all you have is a vague concept to start with. Perhaps “what makes a man evil” or “rebel battalion fights tyrannical dictator” are premises you start with, and work your way from there, setting up the setting, the characters, and the motives for each of them, and seeing where it takes you. Let the story right itself. 

While this is your best shot at limitless creativity, which is a massive pro, not having a concrete plan for your story could lead to ret-cons and plot holes later on if you’re not able to reconcile the loose ends of your story by the time you’re reached, say, 60,000 words. When you write from scratch and see where it goes, you run the risk of starting and stopping too many subplots that ultimately take away from the underlying story and you’re left with a narrative mess. 

This is even true when writing a long series, for even though you will need countless subplots to keep a long series going, too many can always be a downfall, and not everyone can create an endlessly expanding universe like Stan Lee did with MARVEL.

Writing semi-biographical

Historical fiction can often have some of the hardest-hitting stories and messages as it’s often personal accounts of real human beings and their hardships mixed with the personability of a fictional story. Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns was one of the most profoundly gut-punching reads I’ve experienced and it’s because of not only the detailed suffering of his protagonists but the levels of truth to the hardship that transpired and the fact that this truly was the reality of many women during 70s, 80s, and 90s Afghanistan. 

A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway – see my review on it – is nearly a pound-for-pound autobiography as the main character Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver during the Italian campaign of WWI who falls in love with an English nurse, almost exactly as Hemingway did, with of course some nuance and major differences toward the end of the book, but underlying skeleton outline of the story’s premise remains painfully similar to Hemingway’s own life, so it adds a degree of realism to it as well as empathy, peering into this man’s psyche and how he overcame what he did with the courage that he did it with. 

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline, who practically wrote his own life through the lens of his own alter-ego. 

This is simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest forms of writing, as writing from your own life and experience is simple and straightforward from memory, practically nulling the possibility of a writer’s block, but how do you go about framing that? Are you ready to write something like this? Do you feel you have changed and matured enough from where you were that this story really comes full circle enough to become a novel?

Really, it’s up to the writer and their experiences. I often believe the more someone has gone through, the more their writing benefits. If you write for a living, you better live for good writing. 
There is no right or wrong way to go about writing a novel, unless you 100% copied someone else’s work, because that is plagiarism.