Research: eliminating the fear of the blank page -- Characters: the plot kernel and what follows it -- Digging deeper into character: the core need -- Landscape: the inner and outer world of characters -- Dialogue: revealing a character through speech -- The THAD: foundation of good storytelling -- Viewpoint and voice: who can tell the story best? -- Development: process, decisions, and the plot -- Step outlining: what happens next? -- Building the scene: using your research -- The scene's requirements I: openings and plot points -- The scene's requirements II: climax and denouement -- Structuring the scene: a few possibilities -- Revising: being your own editor -- Routine: after all, it's still a job

"As the author of twenty-four novels, Elizabeth George is one of the most successful--and prolific--novelists today. In Mastering the Process, George offers readers a master class in the art and science of crafting a novel. For many writers, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to take that earliest glimmer of inspiration and shape it into a full-length novel. How do you even begin to transform a single idea to a complete book? Elizabeth George takes us behind the scenes and into each step of her writing process, revealing exactly what it takes to craft a novel. Drawing from her personal photos, early notes, character analyses, and rough drafts, George shows us every step of how she wrote her novel Careless in Red, from researching location to imagining plot to creating characters to the actual writing and revision process itself. George offers us an intimate look at the process she follows, while also providing invaluable advice for writers about what's worked for her--and what hasn't. Mastering the Process offers writers practical, prescriptive, and achievable tools to creating a novel, to editing a novel, and to problem solve when in the midst of a novel, from a master storyteller writing at the top of her game"--