The Method
Finishing the draft
is the halfway point.
Every novel gets judged on a handful of decisions, whether or not the writer has deliberately made them. Keepwrite's workbooks guide you through each one, so every decision is yours.
The decisions a book gets judged on
The same questions come up on both roads. An agent asks them at the query. A reader asks them at the sample page. Either way the writer has to arrive with answers.
The Promise
What the ending will deliver, and whether the book has been building toward that ending or a different one.
Agent Does the pitch match the pages?
Reader Is this the book the cover sold me?
The Shelf
Which section the book sits in, and which conventions come with the shelf it chose.
Agent Where does this go in the catalogue?
Reader Is this what I came here for?
The Length
Word count is a market fact before it is a craft one, and every shelf has a range.
Agent Can this be sold at this length?
Reader Is this worth the price?
The Register
Where the prose sits between commercial and literary, and whether it holds that line for three hundred pages.
Agent Who is the audience?
Reader Does this read like the books I like?
Three stages, and the cost of waiting
The catalogue is built in stages because the decisions have an order, and each one gets more expensive the longer it waits.
1
Before the Outline
Testing an idea until it can carry a novel, before it costs you months to find out that it cannot.
2
Decide What to Keep
The genre workbooks. Every genre makes a different promise to its reader, so every genre gets its own edition rather than a shared template with the nouns swapped.
3
Beyond the Draft
Revision, where every decision made earlier gets audited against what actually landed on the page.
A promise you change at the outline stage costs an afternoon. The same change after the draft costs a rewrite.
The instruments
Each book runs on a small set of named instruments. Here is what a few of them do. What they ask, you will find inside.
The Promise Scales
Sets the content promises the ending has to pay, marked on an axis.
The Tone Axes
Your novel's register marked across five axes, then named in three words it has to keep.
The Trope Menu
The genre's twelve standing tropes, defined, each on deliberately taken or declined.
The Arcs
Every arc mapped from opening to ending before the outline assigns it a chapter.
The Gate
Every edition ends at one: a checklist the outline has to pass before the workbook will say "now write."
What these books hold to
Every genre makes a different promise, and the planning follows from the promise.
Planning is deciding what to keep, which means deciding what to cut before you have written it.
Market questions are craft questions. Leaving them until the end is what makes them feel like marketing.