Jennie Nash - Blueprint for a Book

Blueprint for a Book:
Build Your Novel from the Inside Out

Copyright 2021 by Jennie Nash

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Tree Farm Books
Santa Barbara, CA
www.jennienash.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021910514

Permission to use material from other works:
Ann Rittenberg graduation speech
permission granted by Ann Rittenberg

Author photo by Ashleigh Taylor
Cover design by Stuart Bache
Page layout by Carla Green

ISBN paperback 978-1-7332511-2-9
ISBN ebook 978-1-7332511-3-6

Visit jennienash.com/blueprint

W hether youre writing your first novel or your tenth, there is a temptation to sit down and pin it to the page before it disappears. Its such a brilliant idea and you can practically see the whole thing shimmering there in your mind, just out of reach. Besides, writing feels so goodits wholly in your control and you can lose yourself for hours in the world of your story. Maybe you do some work on character development and plotting, but you are a racehorse at the gate, ready to run, ready to write.

What this book is about is convincing you to stop.

I want you to slow down for as much time as it takes to answer the 14 questions in the Blueprint. It might take a week or a month, but the time you spend doing this will save you from running for miles in the wrong direction.

Im a book coach, which if Im being polite, means that I give writers the editorial feedback, emotional support, and project-management framework they need to do their best work. If I am not being polite, I describe the work like this: I rescue books from the jaws of death and save writers from themselves.

Because, like it or not, you are the wolf at the door, the snarling obstacle in the way of writing a good novel. (I knowyou were a racehorse, now youre a wolf. Soon, you will be a house builder. Just work with me!) Writers constantly fall prey to doubt, frustration, and feelings of overwhelm, and the most powerful way to minimize these career-crushing emotions is to take the time before you start to write (or revise) to understand the basic elements of your story. Writing your way to the answers is wildly inefficient, but its what the vast majority of writers tend to do.

Note that I said this work will help minimize the career-crushing emotions, not avoid them. Its not possible to avoid them. There is no magic bullet, no proven success formula, no way to reverse engineer a good book. Writing a novel is a complex intellectual and creative undertaking. Its hard. What the Blueprint for a Book system does is guide you through the most challenging parts of writing a novel all at one time before you start to write (or revise). In other words, its a tool to make the process more efficientwhich should be a relief if you are writing your first book and a necessity if you are writing towards a tight deadline with a publisher.

Not convinced? Imagine that instead of writing a book, youre building a house. For months youve been driving through the neighborhood looking at homes, tearing pages out of decorating magazines, and visiting Pinterest to look at tile and paint chips. In your mind, you can just see your new housethe modern kitchen with sunlight streaming through the skylights, the bathroom with a deep soaking tub, a patio with a built-in barbecue where all your friends will gather on summer afternoons. You cant wait to get started. You show up at the construction site on the day they are set to dig the foundationbut the workers are sitting around idle. The contractor is in his truck fingering a tape measure.

Whats the trouble? you ask.

He shrugs. How big did you want that kitchen?

You close your eyes and picture the marble island, the double-wide fridge, the open shelving you want for your teapot collection. Big, you say, holding out your arms to indicate the expanse where your dog will lounge and your kids will play.

He nods, and then yells to his guys: Okay, start digging, and make it big.

This scenario would never actually happen. No one would ever dream of building a house without a blueprint to define the exact specifications of the structure. Building a house is too complex, risky, and expensive an undertaking to leave anything to chance. The same thing is true of writing a novel, but for some reason, many writers are reluctant to embrace that idea. They have bought into the image of the creative genius, pouring words onto the page as if lit by divine inspiration. Thats one reason for this blind spot.

The other is the misconception that all you need to do is work at the outline of the storythe plot, or what happens and once youve got that settled, the book will write itself.

Unless youre enormously lucky or wildly talented, these pathways will not lead you to write the kind of book that captures a readers heart. If you plow ahead without understanding your story inside and out, you are setting yourself up for failure. Sure, you may write a few transcendent paragraphs, or maybe a chapter or three or five that really sing, but the book itself will not hold together. Agents and editors (who are highly trained to sniff out weakness) and readers (who can sense it on a different level) will immediately know it the same way a building inspector would know if the electrical wiring in a house isnt up to code.

Like the architect for a house, you need to be the architect of your book and start with a blueprint. You need to spend some time hammering out the foundation of your story, identifying the underlying logic of it, understanding your own emotional connection to it, and making fundamental decisions about shape and structure. It is shocking how many writers leap over this stage of the creative processgoing straight into character development, plotting, or writing and how much frustration they invite into the process as a result.

If you want to write a novel that has a fighting chance of capturing a readers attention, at some point you are going to have to do this work. The question is: Do you want to do it now, or after youve spent years on a draft that doesnt deliver?

What Exactly is the Blueprint for a Book System?

The Blueprint for a Book system walks you through 14 foundational questions about your story. Some of these questions may seem simple and obvious, but they are not meant to be answered quickly. Youre not checking off boxes on a government formcheck, yes, got it, next. I typically spend four to eight weeks going back and forth with a writer on the Blueprint, and the work is often grueling, because so many writers would rather just write. I want you to fight the urge. I want you to wrestle with these questions, ideally before you write a single word, but they can be instructive wherever you are in writing or revising your book. Working on them should be an iterative processmeaning you return again and again to your answers as you deepen your understanding of your story. You revise and edit. You tweak and trim. You go back through the steps over and over and over again until the foundation of your story is solid. Every step you take in the Blueprint has the potential to enrich and impact the earlier steps, so its not a linear, straightforward process. You will constantly be adjusting to make it clearer, stronger, and more solid.

The bulk of your time will be spent on the steps in