Writing advice

How to Write a Novel: From Blank Page to First Three Chapters

How do you write a novel? How do you even start, let alone get to The End? We hear you: it’s your dream, but that dream is daunting. But don’t let that stop you. Writing a novel is a big undertaking, but it can be broken down into a series of small, manageable steps, and you don’t need years or a degree to do it. 

So, let’s look at these steps and get you started on your writing journey. 

The 6 Steps to Writing a Novel

  1. Genre – Get to know your genre inside out
  2. Ideas and Hooks – Choose the right idea
  3. Plan Your Structure – Give your story the regular turning points readers need
  4. Get to Know Your Protagonist – Create a main character readers will root for
  5. Write Your Opening – Hook your readers and hit your chapter three milestone
  6. Keep Going! – Find momentum and satisfy your readers

You’ll notice writing starts at step five of six. Perhaps you’ve clocked that we’ve put plot before character. This approach might be quite different to advice you’ve heard elsewhere. While every writer needs to find their own process, we believe the work you put in before you start writing is the key to your book’s success, both in terms of finishing it and entertaining readers. And experience tells us it’s easier to create the perfect characters for a mind-blowing plot, than to force a plot onto characters who already have lives of their own.

1. Genre: start with what you love

Before you do anything else, you need to choose your genre – the category your story should fit into in terms of its tropes, themes, settings and characters, for instance romance or sci-fi. Take a step back and ask: what do I love to read? Write that one. You will have the deepest understanding of that genre, and so be more naturally able to meet the expectations of its readers. If you’re torn between genres, don’t sweat it. Plenty of writers write in multiple genres; you just need to choose the one for this book.

Once identified, you need to learn everything you possibly can about your genre. You might think you know everything there is to know, but we promise, you can always learn more. What kinds of stories keep cropping up? What themes and tropes do readers love? What kinds of characters and settings are essential? What writing styles do readers best connect with? Look at the books you’ve loved most and bestsellers that have entertained millions. Read as much as you can. Study blurbs and real reader reviews, dip into the openings of everything.

Maybe you’re the kind of writer who’s always sparking with ideas and you can’t choose between them, or maybe you just love to write but don’t have an idea you want to turn into a book. Or, perhaps you know exactly what to write, you just can’t get started. All of these problems are normal, and fixed with the same answer: nail your genre. Do this, and you’ll be able to choose your strongest idea, come up with an incredible one, or gain the confidence and drive to finally get started.

2. Ideas and Hooks

It’s only once you know your genre inside out that you should start thinking about ideas for an actual novel, as it’s only then that you’ll understand the essential ingredients, and the red lines not to cross. Then you can brainstorm. Then you can look at your ideas with an objective eye and find the one with the strongest hook. What is a hook? The core of your story that will immediately grab readers’ attention.

This is, by far, the most important part of the process. Your hook will shape every single part of your book, and the most important factor in finding success with a book is to write the right one.

Brainstorming

Inspiration is everywhere. Real life – yours and those of people in the news, in magazines, chatting in online forums. Fictional worlds – you can’t copy someone else’s idea, but you might find in it the spark of one of your own. Historical events – which could be the backdrop to your story, or reimagined in a completely new way. You’re looking for immediately intriguing, emotive situations that would work well in your genre.

This might seem obvious, but it’s important to actually brainstorm! Come up with ten, twenty rough ideas, even if you know half of them are dreadful. Allow yourself to just write down whatever comes to you. Be silly. Have fun. It is very easy to skip this step, or do it half-heartedly, if you feel you already know what you want to write, but in doing so you might miss a stronger idea, or an opportunity to strengthen your existing one, especially if you learned anything new in your genre research.

Finding Hooks

A hook is not the theme, not the twist you’re proudest of – it’s the premise, boiled down to a line a reader grasps instantly. A useful test: if you have to explain it, it isn’t pulling its weight yet.

The best hooks do something quite simple. They open a burning question the reader has to see answered, and they hang a feeling on it: something’s wrong, something’s at stake, or someone’s doing something you’d swear you never would.

Let’s look at some bestselling examples:
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Our House
Louise Candlish

Psychological Thriller

Hook:
A family moves into a beautiful new house… but it’s Fi and Bram’s family home and Fi knows they didn’t sell it.

The Big Question:
How could this have happened? Where will Fi and her family live? Did Bram sell it? How could he have done this without her knowing? And… why???
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Quicksilver
Callie Hart

Romantasy

Hook:
Saeris is pulled into a warring Fae realm and bound to Kingfisher, a (super-hot) ruthless Fae warrior, who wants to use her secret powers – whatever it costs her.

The Big Question:
Will Saeris survive? What are her secret powers? What is this fantastical world? Is Kingfisher good or bad? WILL THEY FALL IN LOVE???
Read over your ideas and look for the one with the strongest hook. Keep the above examples in mind: you want something that speaks to readers of your genre and leaves your heart pounding. If you can't pull a hook out of any of your ideas but still think one has something, try picturing the exact scene that would kick the story off.

3. Plan Your Structure

Almost every story that has ever gripped anyone shares the same underlying shape — the literary prize-winner and the unputdownable bestseller someone inhales on a sun lounger both have it. So don’t reinvent that shape. Understand and use it because it’s what every reader wants.

Start with three points:

1. The Inciting Incident: the moment it kicks off

Something happens to your protagonist that they can’t ignore and can’t undo – the event that forces them out of ordinary life and hands the reader the burning question they’ll keep turning pages to answer. This is your inciting incident, and it should arrive early. Readers abandon stories that dawdle.

2. The Midpoint: the moment it pivots

Near the middle, the ground moves under everyone’s feet – a revelation, a betrayal, a door that won’t close again – and the reader has to reassess everything so far. This is your midpoint, and whatever you’re writing, it should be a genuine turn rather than just another beat. Land it close to halfway: too early and the back half sags, too late and the opening feels like treading water.

3. The Resolution: the moment it lands

The burning question you raised at the start finally gets its answer, and your protagonist comes out the other side changed — vindicated, defeated, or somewhere more interesting in between. This is your resolution.

Play about with these points. Make sure you've found the best versions of each one — and remember that changes in one part might impact the others. Doing this might reveal that your idea doesn't expand into a full novel, or that you just don't know where to take it after the set-up. If so, don't worry. Keep trying. If necessary, go back to your other ideas and see if they spark a solution to your problem, or if there's a stronger idea amongst them. Once those three hold, add the two points that will make this a five-point arc and turn a skeleton into a story:

The Journey

The journey runs from the opening to the pivot – not a single point but the stretch where your protagonist chases what they want and keeps finding it harder, costlier or more tangled than they bargained for. Every step should tighten the screw, turn up the heat, increase reader investment, not simply pass the time. But at first, just work out the biggest turning point between the inciting incident and the midpoint.

The Crisis

The crisis comes between the pivot and the end — the moment where it looks as though your protagonist won’t get what they need. Whatever “worst case” means in your genre — a death, a ruin, a love that looks finished for good — this is where you take them, and where the flaws you gave your characters come back to bite. The reader shouldn’t be able to spot the way out. 

Each point should significantly develop or change the path towards the protagonist's goal, and the answer to the burning question. Get these five points right and you’ve given your book a spine. It makes the writing faster and far less frightening, too: instead of staring into the void, you’re always travelling from one known point to the next.

Example of 5-Point Structure

Warning: contains spoilers for It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover.

1. The Inciting Incident

Reflecting on her abusive father’s death on an apartment building rooftop, Lily Bloom is asked to step back from the edge by a handsome stranger: neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid. 

2. The Journey

Six months later, Lily has followed her dream of opening a flower shop. Ryle and Lily meet again after she sprains her ankle, and her colleague Alyssa calls her husband and brother to came and help: Ryle turns out to be Alyssa’s brother.

They keep running into each other. Ryle isn’t in favour of long-term commitment, but begs to sleep with her. She eventually agrees, although he falls asleep after a long shift. 

Later, at a party, he smashes a glass in frustration, then asks to prove he’s changed and really wants to be with her. They agree to date, and go on to passionately sleep together. 

In the meantime, Lily reads her childhood diaries which help her process her father’s death. In the diary narrative, we learn about Atlas, Lily’s teenage love and the first person she slept with after she helped him escape homelessness. We also learn about how Lily’s father abused her mother, who never did anything about it, and Lily. 

 She later bumps into Atlas at a restaurant and they catch up. Atlas has a girlfriend now, and Lily feels conflicted regret about what could have been between them. 

Over the months, Ryle and Lily keep deepening their relationship.

3. The Midpoint

In a moment of anger – he’d burned his hand on a casserole dish and Lily laughed in shock – Ryle violently pushes Lily.

4. The Crisis

Returning from a trip to give Lily space, Ryle finds out Lily is pregnant. She’s conflicted over whether they should be together.

5. The Resolution

After the birth of their daughter Lily decides to divorce Ryle, asking him what he’d do if a man ever hit their baby daughter when she grows up.

4. Get to Know Your Protagonist

With your five points in place, you can work out who has to walk through them – and that order matters. Ask what kind of person would plausibly make the choices your plot demands, then build someone who could. Readers have to believe this person would really do these things, which means understanding how they came to be who they are.

They also have to want to follow them, and that’s easiest when the reader is on their side. So most commercial protagonists are people we’d like to be, or to know: capable, warm, quick on their feet, trying to do right even when they’re getting it wrong. It isn’t the only route – some of the most gripping narrators are people we’d cross the road to avoid, the ones we watch through our fingers because part of us is willing it all to come apart – but that’s a harder trick, and a riskier one to pull off.

What really binds a reader to a character, though, isn’t likeability. It’s recognition. Something in them has to feel familiar. Perhaps their circumstances are immediately relatable – a working mother in the UK, a teen in love in New York, because a larger proportion of commercial fiction readers are female, and the largest commercial fiction markets are the US and the UK. But this feeling can also be achieved in circumstances that are nothing like ours. It’s the insides that really count: the way they doubt themselves, the corners they cut, the fear they won’t say aloud. 

Nobody believes in a flawless person, and nobody roots for one either. We’ll forgive a character their worst decisions as long as we understand why they made them and can see it costing them something. And we lean all the way in when their situation catches on one of our own quiet fears – the call that comes at 3am, the secret that won’t stay buried, the door that opens on the person we least expected.

For the deepest payoff, give your protagonist a private arc running underneath the plot — someone who finishes the book understanding themselves a little better than they did on page one. Think of a character who stayed with you long after you closed the book, and you’ll almost always find they changed, without ever stopping being themselves.

Editor’s Tip

Don’t vanish down this rabbit hole. At this stage you know only the outline of your story, and reams of invented history will just be painful to unpick later when the plot wants something different. Let your characters stay loosely sketched for now. They’ll come into focus as you write.

5. Write Your Opening

We know you’re raring to go, but at this stage we recommend some more detailed planning to spot any larger plot problems and give you clearer direction. You can’t start your opening without planning it, and you can’t be sure of your plan for your opening without the rest of the book. And then it’s onto page one… We focus on the first three chapters – the first milestone to reach – as by the third chapter, your readers should be thoroughly ‘in’. These chapters alongside your plan will give you everything you need to fully assess the viability of your project, and hopefully give you all the confidence you need to carry you to the end.

Everything an opening has to do comes down to one thing: give the reader a reason to keep reading. In practice that means the first pages juggle several jobs at once – land your inciting incident as early as you can manage, plant the burning question that tugs the reader forward, drop us somewhere we’re happy to spend time, and put a character in front of us we’re glad to follow. Through all of these things you must communicate loudly and clearly: your hook. Hit these points and readers will find your opening unputdownable. Your opening also gestures at your ending – one of the many reasons it pays to know where you’re heading before you set out. And if you’ve done the earlier work, this is less daunting than it sounds: you already know what these pages have to carry.

Which leaves the bit writers agonise over most — the actual sentences. Here’s the reassuring truth: the range of styles that sell brilliantly is vast. If your story and characters are strong, it’s genuinely hard to go far wrong. Let your genre steer you, let the prose carry a little of the flavour of whoever’s telling the story, and otherwise resist forcing yourself into a voice that isn’t yours — you’ll only write stiffer, slower and worse. We’ll leave it there, because for all the hours writers pour into style, it simply isn’t the thing that makes or breaks a commercial book.

6. Keep Going!

Yes, that’s right, that’s step 6. Get to The End. If you have a solid plan, you have both confidence and a story broken into manageable chunks. So, what’s stopping you? Here are some tips to get you to there:

  • Momentum – the magic ingredient that allows you to keep all the threads of your story in your head so you don’t have to keep rereading, that keeps your confidence levels high, that means you don’t feel rusty each time you touch your craft.

  • Routine and Opportunity – learn your writing speed, set yourself realistic but ambitious goals, plan regular writing times, and use every spare moment to write, wherever, whenever, however.

  • The Living Plan – your plan is not a fixed rulebook, it is a working document that will develop as you write. Consult it before and after writing each chapter to keep yourself on track and see the knock-on impact of changes you make while writing.

  • Perfectionism – is a ‘no’. Don’t try to write perfect sentences. Don’t edit sentences as you write. It will slow you down. Once you finish, you’ll need to do some kind of structural editing, and after that stage you can be as particular as you like about your phrasing. But for your first draft, momentum beats perfection every time.

That’s it! A big job, but one that is achievable if you approach it in the right way. Otherwise, millions of books wouldn’t be written every year. And we wouldn’t have authors who publish five or six books in a year, many of whom use the process and techniques we teach in our courses.

If you follow this method and get to chapter three, you’ve turned ‘someday’ into ‘started’ and you have everything you need to get to the end.

Frequently asked questions

Do I really need to plan? I've always just written and seen where it goes.

We strongly recommend you do. Every author has their own process, and you might have such a strong understanding of story structure that it comes naturally, but even if this is the case it’s impossible to foresee all the plot holes you might write yourself into, or to embed the foreshadowing needed for a truly satisfying read, without first understanding your story as a whole. The more you plan, the less you’ll have to fix – and cut (ouch) – later. It is much, much easier to fix issues in a plan than it is to untangle them in a written manuscript. Planning saves you time and heartache.

Why do you put plot before character? I've been told the opposite.

In truth, plot and character go hand-in-hand. You can’t develop one without the other. But by prioritising plot, you ensure your characters don’t lead you down dead ends, and you don’t have to force them to do something out of character or unrealistic to achieve a satisfying plot. Instead, you make sure your characters are perfect for your plot – believable in their choices and motivations and never boring.

What if my idea has already been done?

In a world where (let’s guess) 150 million books have been published, true originality is difficult. So, we urge you not to worry about this too much. Genres are built around shared tropes and themes. The important thing is to be original in your execution. Be a voracious reader in your genre so you can find that thin grey line. If you read enough, you’ll see how close many books are to one another, and will see if yours goes closer.

How do I know if my hook is strong enough?

If it’s short, immediately clear, and gets your heart pounding. The better you know your genre, the greater your confidence will be.

What if my story doesn't fit the five-point arc?

Identify which point is missing. They’re all integral, and once you know which it is, keep working till you’ve got it, or accept that this idea might not work – which might sound awful, but is an important part of the process. Don’t give up to soon though! The most likely issue is the journey. As a series of steps rather than one clear point, it often feels murky. Just figuring out the steps between your inciting incident and midpoint could clarify things. If there are no steps, then you might actually be missing a midpoint twist, your current midpoint being the key turning point in your journey.

Do I really need to know my ending before I start writing?

See question 1! If you don’t know your ending, at least in broad strokes, you don’t know where you’re headed. How can you write chapters, even sentences, that propel readers in the right direction without knowing what that direction is? It’s true that some authors don’t, but so much of that forward momentum has to be added in during a lengthy editing process. Much better to write it in from the start.

How long should my novel be, and how long should chapters be?

Research your genre, as some tend to be much longer than others. As a general rule, commercial novels fall between 80,000 and 90,000 words long, and chapters fall between 1,000 and 2,500 words long.

How long does it take to write a novel?

We work with authors who write multiple books a year. Some take so long they never finish. We recommend learning your writing speed (with NO EDITING!) and setting yourself some targets. Momentum is everything – clarity, direction, confidence and sentences that flow. Most of our authors write one or two books a year, whether they are full-time writers or fitting it in around work and a family. This means taking roughly two to six months to write a first draft, including planning time.

What if I get stuck in the middle?

Go back to your plan. If you’ve planned well enough, it will pull you back on track. If you’ve discovered a new issue, untangle and fix it in your plan before going back to your book. If the problem is one of momentum or losing confidence, allow yourself to read your whole draft so far. This will reveal why you’re stuck, or if you’re just getting normal jitters and the book is great – you just need to press on!

What happens once I’ve finished the first draft?

Sleep on it. Give it at least a few days to get some distance before you read it. Fix things in your plan before tackling the book. 

Try not to wait until your book is perfect before sharing, because as the writer you are too close – you will miss things. And if you think it’s perfect, you’ll be less amenable to what might be very sound advice. Pick who you show it to carefully – are they kind, honest, constructive? Are they readers of your genre? 

Once it’s done, research whether you want to submit to a digital publisher, find an agent in pursuit of being traditionally published, or if you might be a dab hand at self-publishing.

Now for the fun part: actually writing it. Our Start Writing Commercial Fiction course gives you the tools, the plan and the confidence to go from just an idea to your first three chapters.

Your next
chapter awaits