This happens, then this happens

 For the first time for four years, I've embarked on planning out a completely new novel.  Having spent so long editing existing stories, switching round to plucking something completely new out of the ether has been a shock to the system.

When you think about it, creating a novel can be seen as some kind of magic.  The day before you start to write it, it doesn't exist in the world.  Then we start to put words on paper, and suddenly those people and that story exist.  

But the story of a longish novel (mine average 90,000 to 100,000 words each) is a long and involved thing.   So how do I go about creating it?

I start with a rough outline of the story.  In one of my novels I have colonists settling a completely wild world.  The outline of that story was one of gradually revealing one strange thing after another about the world.  I knew that the colonists were committed to keeping their new home wild and undeveloped.  I also knew that my antagonist had a different agenda.  He was being bankrupted by his bloodsucking ex-wife, and what motivated him was money.  So he was being bribed by an underhand mining corporation to secretly discover valuable minerals and metals there.  That created the major conflict of the novel.  When the mining company arrived, the colonists had to devise ways of fighting them off and defending their home.  

That was the broad outline of the novel, but to get from that to a finished story I needed to invent all the detail.  And the story lies in the detail.

The way I go about it is to create a chapter plan which tells me what action has to take place in that part of the story.  It also identifies the viewpoint character.  The outline is just a bald statement of who does what when, and why.  When I come to write the chapter, I have to put those action points together into a coherent narrative.

I establish the characters in their setting, then something happens.  The story needs to show the characters reacting to that happening.  And what they do when reacting tells me what happens next.   So I construct my rough outline by working out what the next happening should be at each point.

The story is like a string of beads, with each action linked to the next by exposition, or maybe by a brief section of telling which moves the characters from one place to another.

Action and reaction, cause and effect, these are the things which move the story forward.  In my new novel it's helped me to create 45 chapters so far, and I now have a very good idea of how the end will play out.

This happens, then this happens is the way I break down the daunting task of writing a novel into small and manageable chunks.