There's a method to madness in Writing

Since I'd never written a novel before, I needed all the help I could find to progress the idea into a story and flesh it further out to a complete novel.  I searched high and low for ideas on how to approach this and had many questions. 

1. Do you just write what comes to mind and wing it?
2. Is there planning you can do to help you through the creative process and write chapter by chapter
3. What is planning when it comes to writing?
4. What structure is there to a story?
5. Are there different ways of approach writing a novel.
6. Terminology is drowning me, Help!
7. Arrrgh, my head hurts!

My first port of call was to download software available as demo's on the Internet related to writing novels, screenplays and other formats.  I searched on Google and found Story View,  Dramatica and various others software packages.  I thought by using these products it would help establish the structure of my story and to come to terms with the terminology used.

I found Dramatica could do this but was over the top for me as a novice writer but the up side was it gave me more keywords to search for.

Story View is a different product to Dramatica, is simpler to use and helped with structuring my thoughts into a logical order quickly.  I still needed more to help me put pen to paper though. 

I couldn't sort out a plot and how to weave this throughout a story let alone my own.   I didn't feel I could create characters yet as all I had was an idea.  This is not to say I couldn't, but I didn't have a complete picture of the story and how I was going to tell it so couldn't establish what character types would help me achieve this.

I'd found editor websites with many topics which were good reading and one key phrase which stood out was "First Draft".  It was marked as a first milestone to celebrate as an author when writing a novel.

Questions flooded my mined:

Just what was a First Draft?  Was it a complete story that was perfectly written, had all the detail, correct grammer?  Just what was it?

Turning to Google, I found www.essortment.com.  The content covered many topics but of interest was posts on Stories and Books.

So... I discovered that what I should have been looking for was Writing Technique and the site had great posts on writing a better novel covering three stages and describes what you are doing at each stage.

1. First Draft

2. Second Draft

3. Final Draft

It looks quite obvious doesn't it but I didn't know what was involved to get to a first draft let alone consider completing a second draft or finalising a manuscript.

The posts are well worth a read for someone starting out in writing.

It was interesting that the first draft is seriously underdeveloped as a story and at each stage you are concentrating on specific aspects your stories development. 

Also from www.essortment.com I found a post on writing longer fiction and from it found ideas to outline the story even more and interweave more related subjects.

So... taking everything into consideration with the best interests of the novel at heart, I have diverted my attention from writing the novel to outlining my story in Story View to simplify the process of writing the novel and coming up with a number of potential subjects to weave in as I go.

Well... I say divert.  I'm sure I'll write snippets as they come to mind.  I just can't help myself.