A step-by-step guide to giving your story a solid foundation
This post is all about the best novel writing template.
When you start writing a novel, you need to make sure you’re including all the key elements of a story in your writing process… but sometimes, that can feel overwhelming. It’s important to find a novel writing template that will take away the guesswork so that you can bring your story idea to life seamlessly.
There are tons of book outline template softwares out there, but learning a new software while trying to write your novel can be overwhelming for new writers.
So, you need a good template that’s easy to use no matter what your novel is about or where you’re writing it.
When we created our book writing templates here at LVD Letters Creative, we wanted to create something simple and straight-forward that any beginner writer could implement as a valuable tool in their novel writing journey. In this post, you’ll get a step-by-step guide to our book writing template and leave with a better idea of how to use it.
This post is all about the best novel writing template.
ALL ABOUT OUR NOVEL WRITING TEMPLATE:
What is a novel writing template?
A novel writing template is a tool that will help you outline all the key aspects of your novel from start to finish. This is a great way for book writers to take their story from an initial idea to a final draft.
A novel planning template will help you get to the heart of the story, but it will also give you a good high level overview of your novel as you plan your story outline.
When you use a good novel outline template, you’re setting yourself up for success because it means you’re brainstorming thoroughly so you’ll always have ideas to fall back on when you inevitably get writer’s block.
We’ve broken down our novel planning template into three separate workbooks to help you through your story.
- Plotting Prodigy: the free novel plotting template
- Real Characters: the character planning template to help you unpack your character profiles and character development
- Build My World: the template that dives into building a setting that will fully immerse your reader
The best way to use these novel writing templates is to go through them step-by-step. Use them before you start writing your story, but you can also continually come back to them throughout your novel writing process, using them as a resource to ensure you didn’t overlook any key elements of your story.
Novel plotting template to help you map out your story
Download Plotting Prodigy, our free plot outline workbook, by clicking here.
This workbook walks you through all the main events of your story to ensure you’ve got everything covered in your first draft. It includes:
- A guide on how to mind map for more productive brainstorming sessions
- Beat sheet and conflict planning sections to help you unpack different plot points
- Sections to create a detailed outline
- Questions that will help you get to the heart of your story
- Sections to help you understand the beginning of the book, middle of the book, and end of the book
- Places to plan different scenes and events, as well as the order in which they happen
- Space to brainstorm and track stray thoughts so that you don’t end up with plot holes
- A guide through mapping out your story structure so you understand all the key stages of your novel
- Space to list the sequence of scenes so you can keep everything in the right order, whether you’re writing chronologically or not
100+ novel writers have used this novel plotting workbook to get the ball rolling in their writing journey! No matter what type of book you’re writing, you need a novel writing template to plan out both the big picture and the fine details… and that’s exactly how we’ve designed this novel plotting workbook.
Character planning template to help you understand your characters
Buy Real Characters, our character planning workbook, by clicking here.
The great thing about this workbook is that you can buy it once but use it again and again for as many characters as you want. This template isn’t only for your main characters… It’s also for your antagonists, side characters, and whoever else you want!
This will help you with planning out…
- Character backstories, personalities, and profiles
- Character arcs and character development
- Love triangles and relationships (whether you’re writing a romance novel or not!)
- Character fears and motivations, with tons of questions to guide you even deeper
- Character descriptions and physical appearance
Whether you’re writing a complex character or a simple supporting character, understanding who is in your novel is one of the most important things you can do.
Characters truly make or break a novel. As someone who studied Creative Writing and is now a writing coach for aspiring authors, I’ve seen way too many times when writers are focused on all their new ideas for plot, and they overlook one of the most important steps in novel writing… understanding your characters!
There are tons of free character sheets on the internet, but lots of them only focus on a general character profile. They don’t get into the fine details.
If you want to write compelling characters, you need to understand them on a deep level in all the different stages they go through.
Download our character planning template, Real Characters, so that you can use it for all the new characters you create.
World building template to help you build a convincing setting
Buy Build My World, our world building workbook, by clicking here.
World building is another key aspect of novel writing that many beginner authors overlook.
Whether you’re incorporating historical events into your story, writing a fantasy novel, creating some fictional world, or even writing a nonfiction book, it’s imperative that you understand the culture, setting, weather, laws, rules, politics, and society of the world you’re writing.
We created Build My World as an all-encompassing world building template to help connect your setting with your characters and plot.
Planning your novel is about a lot more than just having a central idea for your story or understanding the different events that happen. Authors who end up writing novels that turn into best sellers are those who have thought deeply about their setting and the world in which their story takes place.
There’s a big misconception about this…
People often think that world building is only meant for specific genres like fantasy or dystopia, where there are complex fictional worlds that might operate differently from the real world. But, that couldn’t be further from the truth!
Think of your story’s world like your real-life hometown. Surely the culture, customs, language, and politics of your hometown shaped you as a person, influenced your outlook on life, or at least shaped certain events that have happened in your life.
That’s exactly how it is when you’re writing a novel.
The setting in which your story takes place will largely shape the characters and plot, so it’s critical not to overlook this section of your novel writing template.
Download Build My World, our world building template, to craft a believable setting.
Where to write your first draft
As long as you have a solid novel planning template, it doesn’t really matter where you write your first draft.
You can use Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Pages, or even a proper novel writing software like Scrivener (which is my favorite!) but ultimately, once you have your ideas laid out in an organized book template, you can start writing your novel on whatever platform feels most comfortable to you!
If you’ve already purchased the Complete Novel Planning Bundle (or at least downloaded the free workbook, Plotting Prodigy, to start) then you can read this post next, which is all about how to write a book in 5 steps.
