• By Winston Kuwada
• Published 02/16/2012
• Writing

If you have big dreams of writing a novel, then I’ve got great news. There’s never been a better time to be a writer than today. With manufacturers competing over business for tablet computers, largely designed to read eBooks with, the reading market is set to explode. If you start writing now, you can catch a boom that is expected to last several years. Of course, writing a novel isn’t easy. You’ve got to spend a lot of time writing and rewriting. And coming up with the plot and characters is something that is as difficult as actually writing the novel itself. However, there are some certain things you can do which will make writing your novel a lot easier. Things you’ll learn in this article. First of all, they say that you should write what you love, and let the rest take care of itself. However, this is only partly true. While it’s important to write about something that you are generally interested in, since you’ll be doing it for the better part of a year, it’s also got to be something that other people are interested in as well. Otherwise, nobody will buy it. For example, if you love gardening and economics, and decide to write a story about garden vegetables who come life at night and discuss equilibrium price theory, you aren’t likely to sell many copies.

To figure out how to match your interests to the inter

ests of the market, make a list of the kinds of books you’ve read in the past that you’ve enjoyed. Stick with general genres for now. Things like mystery, romance, crime drama, science fiction, whatever you can think of. Next, head on down to the bookstore, or check out Amazon.com. See if you can find a top fifty best seller list for every week for the past few weeks. Find the genres on there that have consistently been on the top of the fiction list. Once you’ve got a few of those genres, then see if anything on your list matches it. If it does, then you’re ready for the next step. The next step is to simply figure out which of the genres you’d like to write about. Take your time, because you are going to be spending the next several months on this topic. Pick which one you like, and then move on to the next step. Now you’ve got to come up with a specific story. It’s been said that nothing new is ever written, and the same stories are basically written over and over again. This is largely true. So think of some of the best novels that you have read, and “borrow” some of the plot elements from them. Pick four or five basic plot elements, and weave them into your own story.

When you do these basic procedures, you’ll come up with a pretty solid idea for a plot that you’ll enjoy writing, and that will be interesting to a large number of people. Now all you’ve got to do is start writing, and don’t stop.