How I Begin a New Book

 

I always start with the characters. Because I write romance, I generally have two point of view characters. They always have something they want and something they don't know that they need. Of course, it's more fun when all of those needs and wants are conflicting. Keep in mind, you can have a story without a plot, but you can't have a story without characters. I find my images in magazines and catalogs. Because this particular story revolves around a family, you'll notice that my "brothers" all look alike. I'm okay with that. No one but me, and now I guess all of you, ever look at this board. It's up to me to describe my characters. This helps a lot, because I can just look at the board when I forget if my character has blue or green eyes.

I spend way too much time in front of a computer, so I like enjoy this old school activity. This board is also pinned up on my writing room wall. You'll notice I have about 40 scenes. This will probably grow as I write. My goal for this particular story is about 80k words, or about 350 pages. If you do math, and I try to do as little as possible, that's about 2k words per scene.