How to Write a Fantasy Novel (Efficiently)

I stated in an article a while back that D&D adventures don’t make good fantasy novels. I stand by that, but I will clarify what I meant by saying that you can absolutely get insipiration from your table-top D&D game, but a literal transcript of the sequence of events in that game session likely would not make a good novel.

My name is Steve Williamson and I have been playing D&D, primarily as a dungeon master, since 1980. I’ve also written four fantasy novels, with my first book, Ohlen’s Arrow, that came out in 2013.

This article is not about D&D, though. It’s about how to write a fantasy novel. Or at least it’s an explanation of the very efficient and effective way that I write a novel. I’m sharing my process in the hopes that it helps you if you’re interested in becoming an author, too.

FOUNDATION

It’s been my observation after playing D&D since I was 12 and after writing and publishing four fantasy novels, that many people who play D&D and especially those who run the game have a serious itch to turn their creative ideas into a fantasy novel.

This article is about the process I have used to do exactly that, four times.

The process I use is efficient, methodical, and productive. With this approach, it’s reasonable to expect that you can write an 80,000-word fantasy novel from your initial high concept to being publication-ready in six months or less.

Although this article is specifically about how to write a fantasy novel, the methods I describe would work for just about any kind of fiction, not just fantasy.

My method for writing a fantasy novel has four main phases:

Conception, Planning, Composition, and Editing.

In my experience, I have spent about two weeks on the conception phase, between 4 to 8 weeks on planning, about 8 weeks or less on composition, and about a month on editing.

So here goes.

Phase 1: Conception

Phase 1 is Conception. This is where you brainstorm your high-level ideas for the novel. You begin with a premise for the overall story that can be expressed in one or two sentences. This is often called the “high concept.” Here are some examples:

After their parents are slain, a young boy is taken captive from his village by a roving band of demon-possessed pirates. It is up to his older sister to chase down the pirates and rescue him.

Another could be:

The elderly residents of a remote village in the hinterlands of Valusia have fallen under a mysterious magic spell that makes them lose their memory of the day’s events every evening at sunset. Only a formerly outcast member of the village can locate the secret to lift the curse.

Notice that in these two examples, all of these would work as the high concept for a D&D adventure. Playing D&D or any other fantasy RPG can provide a wealth of inspiration that will feed your story’s concept. You can directly or indirectly model characters in your story after player characters or even memorable NPCs from your table-top game.

Creativity rarely fits a schedule, so be ready when it decides to show up.

Keep a notepad handy, or a note-taking app on your phone or computer, and record your ideas as they come to you. I have always used a paper composition notebook, but I’ve also used basic text apps on my computer and the Notes app on my phone.

The output of your Conception phase is your high concept.

Phase 2: Planning

The second phase is Planning.

Once you have your high concept, you will probably already have an idea for at least one of the main characters. The planning phase is where you decide the who, what, when, and where. The why question has already been implicitly determined in your high concept, but you will expand on that in the planning phase.

I have found that the planning phase is arguably the most important, and potentially the most challenging step in your novel writing journey. This is where you decide who will be in your story, where they will exist and operate, what will happen to them, and in what order.

WHO

I tend to look at my high concept and let that inform who my main characters are. There is no hard rule that says you must have a particular number of characters, but for your first novel, I’d suggest sticking with one main character and a supporting cast of secondary characters. If you’re a D&D player, think of it like an adventuring party and their adventures are told from the perspective or focus on one of the adventurers.

As you decide on your cast of characters, flesh them out. I’ve actually made D&D character sheets for characters in one of my books and found it to be helpful. No matter what, you’ll want to figure out what your characters look like. Keep those notes handy because you want to maintain consistent descriptions of them throughout your book. You don’t want to say the character has straight hair in chapter 1 and then refer to their curly locks in chapter 12.

Define how tall your characters are, how much they weigh, their age, eye color, and how they tend to dress. I also define the basics of their personality. Such as what are their fears? What are they passionate about? What drives them? This is kind of like writing the backstory of a D&D character. Think of it in terms of an actor trying to get into the head of the character they play in a movie. If you’re the director, how would you describe the role to your leading actor? Write that down!

One trick is to update your character notes as you spontaneously come up with little details later in the story, then keep referencing your character notes as you write to stay consistent. It also helps you get into their head when you’re composing your main story and especially their dialogue.

Don’t forget to define these character references for your antagonists as well, not just your protagonists.

WHAT

Now that you’ve got your main cast defined, the “what” section of the planning phase is where you outline the main events of what happens to them. If a character is captured by bad guys, or another character is killed, write that down. If an object is lost or found, write that down, too. If the protagonist defeats the antagonist, you got it, write that down.

This is the part of your plan that details key events or moments of action.

WHEN

Your main action moments will occur in some particular order within your story. You want a chronological log of what happens to whom and when.

The order you reveal events to the reader may or may not be in the actual chronological order they occur. Regardless, you still need to outline the actual sequence for your reference.

WHERE

It’s probably best to define the locations where your main action events occur after you’ve got those defined and the order they take place. Considering this is probably a fantasy novel, you may create a crude map that you can reference in the planning phase as well as when composing the main story. Even if your story is based in the real world or just inspired by real locations, it’s a great idea to have a map handy that you can consult. This will help you ensure characters don’t travel 1,000 miles in a day while walking on foot. You will also be a bit more consistent and not write yourself into a plot hole where characters are in one location in one scene, and then jarringly in another location without there being an explanation for how they got there.

Are you intimidated yet?

I’ll admit that the planning phase is probably where I have spent more creative time and energy than any other aspect of the project. This is where I agonize over what my characters are like, their story arc, their struggles and triumphs and so on. Even coming up with character names can take me several days.

I’ll be honest that getting your planning phase right is where the overall quality and creativity of your story will be determined. It won’t matter if you can turn a phrase better than any other author on the planet, if it’s based on a story arc that’s boring or highly predictable, you’ll lose your reader’s interest.

What you create in the planning phase is the roadmap that you’ll follow when you compose your story, when you actually start writing the words that your reader will consume.

You want to create four things:

• The first is a set of detailed descriptions for all your main characters.
• The second is a map or outline of key locations where all the main events take place.
• The third is a chronological list of key story events in the order they actually occur.
• The fourth and final thing you’ll produce is your plot event list.

Plot Event List

Your plot event list is the most important part of your entire book project.

It is often called an outline, but I think plot event list is more descriptive.

Essentially it is a list of one or two sentences that describe every scene in your story, in the order that they will appear in the book. This may not be the same as your chronological list of events.

Your book will be made up of multiple chapters, and each chapter will contain one or more scenes. I like to write four scenes per chapter, but that’s a matter of personal preference.

When you move on to the composition phase, you won’t be writing a book, you will be writing scenes, one at a time, until all the scenes are written.

It’s like that joke, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Phase 3: Composition

This is where the sexy part of being an author comes in. This is where you start putting words together in a sequence that eventually becomes your story, your book.

At the end of your planning phase, you will have a plot event list. That plot event list is a sequence of scene descriptions in the order that they will appear in your book.

When you start composing your book, you look at your first scene description. It will be one or two sentences that describe a self-contained event, involving one or more characters or other entities, and in a particular location.

It’s much easier to write a small, self-contained scene than it is to write an entire book, or even an entire chapter.

This is where this process shines because you now have a roadmap of scenes that you can write one at a time. They are small enough to be written in a single writing session, often between 800 to 1500 words, sometimes up to 2000 words, but that all depends on what’s going on and your personal preference.

Here’s an example of the first scene from my fourth novel, A Riddle of Scars, as listed in my plot event list:

A mysterious female thief dispatches a wererat outside a tavern.

You’ll notice it’s a very short sentence but it contains four key elements that give me all I need to start writing. It describes the main character of the scene, a mysterious female thief. This implies that her identity is unknown to the reader, so there will only be a physical description of her, no names. It uses the word “dispatches” so that means she kills her opponent in an efficient and deadly manner. Her opponent happens to be a wererat. It also establishes the location, which is outside a tavern.

Based on that single sentence, and knowing what I know from my character profile and locations list, I have all I need to write the first scene. It turned out to be 295 words and probably only took me 10 minutes to write.

Here is the finished scene:

She had watched the shifter most of the evening as it moved about the tavern, finely dressed and smoothly acting like it was just another human customer. She knew it was a shifter, though, from the long fingernails to the extra bit of hair behind its human-looking ears. Even if the wererat didn’t have the most coin for her to steal, it was on the hunt, looking for its next meal to be lured into the alley where it would feed in the darkness. It had to die.

The thief followed it out into the foggy night and deftly separated the coin pouch from the shifter’s belt. She could easily have slipped into the shadows and gotten away, but she was determined to make sure this novaari didn’t see the dawn.

She hooked her finger over the wererat’s belt, giving it a slight yet deliberate tug. The shifter turned and saw her behind it, her face showing a mock expression of fright at having been caught.

“A pickpocket, eh? And a girl, no less? You need to be taught a lesson, little lady.”

The shifter swung its hand in an arc toward her face. The thief ducked, spun, and a dagger flashed between them and disappeared back into its sheath. The wererat looked down, horrified to see its entrails spill out of a wide red gash in its velvet jerkin onto the cobblestones at its feet. It had begun its transition into rat form and the slitted pupils of its now rat-like eyes rose to see its killer’s jeering smile.

“And what lesson is that?” the young woman said. She kicked the wererat in the face, sending its disemboweled body tumbling backward. Turning, she edged into the shadows and silently disappeared into the muggy darkness.

Once that scene is done, I move onto the next scene on my plot event list and so on. In this way, I’m not writing a book, I’m writing a series of scenes, each a small and well-defined effort. Because I’ve planned out the who, what, when and where of all that will happen in the book, my brain only has to focus on the task at hand, the individual scene.

Find Your Consistent Routine

As this process continues, you will get into your own routine of when to write and for how long. My advice, and the advice of many other authors, is to pick a consistent time and place each week that you allocate to writing. Consistency is your friend. You know yourself best and probably already know what days and what time of day you’re most organized, when you’re most creative, when you’re most analytical, and so forth.

I have found that writing on weekend mornings, before the rest of my household is awake, is when I’m most productive for composition. I’ll write for two hours per session. But the time that you’re most productive is up to you. Just try to be consistent as much as possible.

Using this method is very productive for me because my brain doesn’t require a lot of ‘getting in the zone’ to be able to start writing. Scenes are often fairly short so the task at hand is much smaller. That’s less intimidating and it’s also easier to define what needs to be accomplished.

It’s essentially the ‘divide and conquer’ method applied to writing fiction.

Everyone writes at a different pace, but here are some benchmarks for how this process has worked for me. As I mentioned, I write on weekend mornings. I’ll spend five or ten minutes reading the previous few scenes before starting on the new stuff, but it’s most typical for me to write at least 3,000 words per weekend. My average is probably more like five to six-thousand words per weekend, which typically translates into a chapter or two, depending on how complex the scenes are. And again, I usually strive to organize my scenes into four per chapter.

One weekend I was really in the zone and cranked out 12,000 words between a Saturday and Sunday, but I was writing from about six in the morning until noon each of those two days. Regardless, I often write about 1,000 words per hour.

Now, let’s talk about the fourth and final phase, editing.

Phase 4: Editing

Writers really shouldn’t be their own editors.

It’s often been said that you can’t edit your own work, and although life sometimes forces this to happen, I agree with this premise. Hire an editor, someone who’s actually good at editing specifically. I’ve made the mistake of hiring someone who simply reads a lot, thinking they’d be able to spot my errors in a heartbeat. That was a WOMBAT … a waste of money, brains and time.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of editors, and you need both.

One is a story editor. This is the person who will spot chronological errors in your plot, or inconsistencies in your character descriptions. For example, they will point out that you stated the main character is right-handed in chapter three, but in chapter 17 you describe them as wielding a sword with their left hand. Your story editor will ask if this is intentional.

The story editor will also let you know if your pace is slowing down or speeding up in a way that is jarring or odd. They will let you know if the tone of how you describe settings or dialogue varies. Often they will phrase it as a question, “Things really slowed down and your main character seemed to be in a good mood at the start of chapter 6, but at the end of chapter 5, things were very fast-paced and your character had just experienced something traumatic. Why are they now happy?”

The other kind of editor is what’s called a line editor. These are the people who don’t get into the plot and the feel of things in your story, but instead focus on the mechanics of your writing, such as the words and grammar and punctuation.

If the story editor tells you that your melody is too upbeat for a funeral dirge, it will be the line editor who says you played a B-flat in the chorus when it should have been a G-sharp.

I’ve been fortunate to find an editor that serves both roles, but we still tackle those story editing and line editing tasks as separate efforts.

Another thing to remember is that it is your editors’ job to make your story the best it can be, but they remember that it’s your story, not theirs. They might make suggestions from time to time, but there’s a line they shouldn’t cross when it comes to declaring what should and shouldn’t be in your story.

Learn to trust your editors and rely on their guidance. Don’t discount their contribution. They are like a record producer who takes a good band and makes them a great band. But it’s still you playing the music.

The process I like to use with my editor is for me to spend Saturday and Sunday writing, then I send off what I produced over the weekend to my editor. They review it and come back to me usually by Thursday or Friday with their feedback and suggestions. We use track changes turned on to highlight their suggestions and questions. I may go through their edits that same evening, as it usually doesn’t take more than 30 minutes to implement.

Then, I start writing new material the following Saturday morning. Rinse and repeat.

Iterative Editing

This process of writing a chapter, editing and revising before moving onto the next chapter means I am continuously building a quality story as things progress. It’s very rare to have to go back and rewrite much beyond changing a word or paragraph or two. On very rare occasions, the most major thing I’ve had to do was remove a scene or reorganize where it occurs in the story.

Once all the scenes are written and revisions have been made based on those story-level suggestions from my editor, basically once the first draft is done, I’ll let the entire project sit for a minimum of two weeks. I don’t touch it, I don’t look at it, I don’t even think about it, and neither does my editor.

After those two weeks have gone by, I’ll export the entire book onto my iPad and I’ll spend the next week reading the book cover to cover. I’ll keep a paper notebook handy to make notes. I’ll indicate any misspelled words or missing punctuation, but more importantly I’ll also note any changes to wording or tone that I wish to make. I’ll pay attention to pacing, too, or any continuity issues that may crop up.

My editor will do the same thing. We’ll compare notes after a week and I’ll spend however much time I need implementing any changes that we discover. During this process, as I make changes to a chapter, I’ll forward that individual chapter back to my editor. Because the edits I’m addressing will be spread here and there throughout the entire book, it won’t be uncommon for me to send a half-dozen chapters to my editor per day for a week, maybe two. (NOTE: Sometimes you introduce new errors when editing, so everything you do gets another review.)

Once all those edits have been implemented, we’ll do the whole-book review once again, minus the two-week pause. This would be a good time to get beta readers involved. Both myself and my editor will review the entire book one more time, focusing primarily on line-level editing more than story-level stuff. However, if we see an issue or if beta readers come back with major concerns or feedback, we’ll work on that, no matter how big or small.

TIME

If you’ve been keeping track, that’s been roughly a five-week editing process. In my experience, this has never entailed any major re-writes. On only one occasion, I removed an entire chapter from the story as my editor and I both felt that it didn’t add anything to the book, and it had a slightly incorrect impact on the tone of the story, so I nixed it. On another occasion, I added a couple of short scenes to the existing chapters, but that took less than a day.

Notice that I have not said anything about publishing. Getting a finished manuscript ready for submission to agents, or ready for self-publishing, is a technical aspect of being an author that really is a straightforward albeit tedious process. I don’t have anything to say or add that makes that process any more efficient or less tedious than it already is. (NOTE: You can hire this out to Fiverr and other qualified gig workers. Also, unless you’re also an experienced graphic designer-slash-illustrator, I highly recommend hiring someone else to design your cover.)

Every person is different and we all have our own optimized way of getting things done. My process has proven to be very efficient, but it may not be the best approach for you. I made this guide in the hope that you can find something of value that helps make you a more efficient writer.