Blueprint for a Book

By Jennie Nash

How to write a novel in the most efficient way by tackling the hardest part before you start to write, from top book coach Jennie Nash

"This process makes me want to write, and it makes what I'm writing better. I read it before every draft. It's that good." -KJ Dell'Antonia, New York Times bestselling author of The Chicken Sist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tree Farm Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781733251136

Jennie Nash

Jennie Nash is the author of The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming: And Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer and Altared States. Her work has appeared in Child, Shape, HOME, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Working Mother, Glamour, GQ, Mademoiselle, US, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. She lives in Torrance, California with her husband and her two daughters.

Book preview

Introduction

Whether you’re writing your first novel or your tenth, there is a temptation to sit down and pin it to the page before it disappears. It’s such a brilliant idea and you can practically see the whole thing shimmering there in your mind, just out of reach. Besides, writing feels so good—it’s wholly in your control and you can lose yourself for hours in the world of your story. Maybe you do some work on character development and plotting, but you are a racehorse at the gate, ready to run, ready to write.

What this book is about is convincing you to stop.

I want you to slow down for as much time as it takes to answer the 14 questions in the Blueprint. It might take a week or a month, but the time you spend doing this will save you from running for miles in the wrong direction.

I’m a book coach, which if I’m being polite, means that I give writers the editorial feedback, emotional support, and project-management framework they need to do their best work. If I am not being polite, I describe the work like this: I rescue books from the jaws of death and save writers from themselves.

Because, like it or not, you are the wolf at the door, the snarling obstacle in the way of writing a good novel. (I know—you were a racehorse, now you’re a wolf. Soon, you will be a house builder. Just work with me!) Writers constantly fall prey to doubt, frustration, and feelings of overwhelm, and the most powerful way to minimize these career-crushing emotions is to take the time before you start to write (or revise) to understand the basic elements of your story. Writing your way to the answers is wildly inefficient, but it’s what the vast majority of writers tend to do.

Note that I said this work will help minimize the career-crushing emotions, not avoid them. It’s not possible to avoid them. There is no magic bullet, no proven success formula, no way to reverse engineer a good book. Writing a novel is a complex intellectual and creative undertaking. It’s hard. What the Blueprint for a Book system does is guide you through the most challenging parts of writing a novel all at one time before you start to write (or revise). In other words, it’s a tool to make the process more efficient—which should be a relief if you are writing your first book and a necessity if you are writing towards a tight deadline with a publisher.

Not convinced? Imagine that instead of writing a book, you’re building a house. For months you’ve been driving through the neighborhood looking at homes, tearing pages out of decorating magazines, and visiting Pinterest to look at tile and paint chips. In your mind, you can just see your new house—the modern kitchen with sunlight streaming through the skylights, the bathroom with a deep soaking tub, a patio with a built-in barbecue where all your friends will gather on summer afternoons. You can’t wait to get started. You show up at the construction site on the day they are set to dig the foundation—but the workers are sitting around idle. The contractor is in his truck fingering a tape measure.

What’s the trouble? you ask.

He shrugs. How big did you want that kitchen?

You close your eyes and picture the marble island, the double-wide fridge, the open shelving you want for your teapot collection. Big, you say, holding out your arms to indicate the expanse where your dog will lounge and your kids will play.

He nods, and then yells to his guys: Okay, start digging, and make it big.

This scenario would never actually happen. No one would ever dream of building a house without a blueprint to define the exact specifications of the structure. Building a house is too complex, risky, and expensive an undertaking to leave anything to chance. The same thing is true of writing a novel, but for some reason, many writers are reluctant to embrace that idea. They have bought into the image of the creative genius, pouring words onto the page as if lit by divine inspiration. That’s one reason for this blind spot.

The other is the misconception that all you need to do is work at the outline of the story—the plot, or what happens— and once you’ve got that settled, the book will write itself.

Unless you’re enormously lucky or wildly talented, these pathways will not lead you to write the kind of book that captures a reader’s heart. If you plow ahead without understanding your story inside and out, you are setting yourself up for failure. Sure, you may write a few transcendent paragraphs, or maybe a chapter or three or five that really sing, but the book itself will not hold together. Agents and editors (who are highly trained to sniff out weakness) and readers (who can sense it on a different level) will immediately know it the same way a building inspector would know if the electrical wiring in a house isn’t up to code.

Like the architect for a house, you need to be the architect of your book and start with a blueprint. You need to spend some time hammering out the foundation of your story, identifying the underlying logic of it, understanding your own emotional connection to it, and making fundamental decisions about shape and structure. It is shocking how many writers leap over this stage of the creative process—going straight into character development, plotting, or writing— and how much frustration they invite into the process as a result.

If you want to write a novel that has a fighting chance of capturing a reader’s attention, at some point you are going to have to do this work. The question is: Do you want to do it now, or after you’ve spent years on a draft that doesn’t deliver?

What Exactly is the Blueprint for a Book System?

The Blueprint for a Book system walks you through 14 foundational questions about your story. Some of these questions may seem simple and obvious, but they are not meant to be answered quickly. You’re not checking off boxes on a government form—check, yes, got it, next. I typically spend four to eight weeks going back and forth with a writer on the Blueprint, and the work is often grueling, because so many writers would rather just write. I want you to fight the urge. I want you to wrestle with these questions, ideally before you write a single word, but they can be instructive wherever you are in writing or revising your book. Working on them should be an iterative process—meaning you return again and again to your answers as you deepen your understanding of your story. You revise and edit. You tweak and trim. You go back through the steps over and over and over again until the foundation of your story is solid. Every step you take in the Blueprint has the potential to enrich and impact the earlier steps, so it’s not a linear, straightforward process. You will constantly be adjusting to make it clearer, stronger, and more solid.

The bulk of your time will be spent on the steps in Part 3: The Inside Outline, which is the heart of the Blueprint for a Book system. All the other steps in the Blueprint lead up to the Inside Outline. If you already love outlines, this one will introduce you to a powerful new element. If you are an outline hater—a so-called pantser who writes by the seat of your pants—I bet that the Inside Outline is one you’ll learn to embrace. This outline is not like any other outline you’ve ever used (or avoided using), because instead of tracing events through time the way traditional plot-based outlines do, it traces the cause-and-effect engine of the story. It’s an entirely different beast. And it’s very short—just three pages, max. It’s like the little foam model of a house an architect builds to get a sense of the shape, or the muslin pattern a seamstress uses to envision how the finished dress will flow, or the clay maquette that helps a sculptor see his work before carving it out of marble. Creators of every kind do work to envision the finished whole before they start. Novelists should be no different.

So settle in, bring an open mind, and let’s build a strong foundation for your story.

You can download a Blueprint workbook at jennienash.com/blueprint.

Story Fundamentals

BLUEPRINT STEP #1

Why Write This Book?

In 2013, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats wrote down the rules for storytelling she learned while working

Reviews for Blueprint for a Book

[AnIncrediblyGinormousBookaholic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought about buying the book years ago. I have to say that it's a lot more valuable than I imagined it would be. It's good enough for me to search for other books written by Jennie.