The Basic Knowledge You Need to Write a Novel

#2. The most tired cliches in literature

We all have books in us. What makes some of us writers — and some of the writers more successful than others — is knowing how to write these books.

I’ve been on the Facebook group Writers Help Writers for a while now, and I see this question a lot. “What do I absolutely need to know to write a novel?” After writing my first novel for ten years and then giving up on it, I’ve learned a lot about what you absolutely need to know to write a book.

If you’re thinking about writing a novel, or you’ve started to write one without really thinking as I did with my first one, here’s a list of things I advise you to learn before you proceed. Trust me, it will save you a lot of time and effort, and it will make your story much better.

I first heard about The 3 Act Structure about twenty thousand words into my novel. I could feel the story sagging and wondered what was supposed to go in the middle to make it an interesting read when I discovered a way people use to structure their novels, so they avoid precisely those kinds of problems.

In short, The 3 Act Structure breaks your story down into three parts: the beginning, middle and end. The beginning and end take up around 25% of your story each, and the middle takes up the other 50%.

There are also certain plot points that you should hit as you’re moving through the story: there’s the inciting incident, a few plot points meant to change the story's direction, rising action, the climax and falling action.

Here’s how The 3 Act Structure looks like.

To learn more about The 3 Act Structure and about writing a novel as a whole, I strongly recommend K.M. Weiland’s blog Helping Writers Become Authors. She also has a podcast by the same name.

Just because these are cliches, it doesn’t mean you can’t write about them. There’s a reason they’ve been used…

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