Building a Book from the Bones up

I've been writing and publishing fiction for seventeen years. Victorian psychological thrillers, dystopian science fiction, and a Sherlock Holmes series that rode the BBC wave and crashed a few years later. I've written stories by the seat of my pants just to spend months untangling the mess afterwards. Others, I've outlined obsessively until my creativity felt trapped. Yet others, I wrote by mixing chaos and planning.

I just started working on Book 5 of The 1/2986 Series, and I'm documenting the entire process. The outlining, writing, editing, and getting it ready for publishing. Every decision and every mistake. Every moment where the whole thing feels like it's collapsing (I’m not there yet, but I know I will be).

The Backstage Pass (€5/month): Diary entries as I build this novel from initial idea to publication-ready manuscript. Every craft decision, structural choice, and character death, including the method walkthroughs so you can apply what you learn to your own work. The dairy lives in our community platform and is already live. The posts right here in this newsletter remain spoiler-free.

The Fiction Writing Workshop (€75/quarter — founding member price, available only this once): Everything in the Backstage Pass, plus craft lessons at your own pace, weekly live video sessions where we workshop each other's work, and once a month I give in-depth feedback on one member's manuscript live on camera. We kick off in the 3rd or 4th week of March. This isn't a masterclass. We have no stage and no PowerPoint slides. We sweat, we curse, and we support each other. You'll build a novel from raw idea through structural outline, first draft, revision, editing, and getting it ready for publishing.

To give you a taste of the method, here’s a spoiler-free summarised walkthough of how I’m building the concept for book 5 of The 1/2986 Series using John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. The raw application with all the bloody details lives in the community diary.

If you're going to write alongside me, you'll need a copy of Truby’s book, because we’re using his approach to build a story from the inside out: character psychology drives plot, not the other way around.

Most story frameworks tell you where things go. Inciting Incident at 12%. Midpoint at 50%. All Is Lost at 75%. That's useful as a container, but it doesn't tell you WHY those things belong together. When something doesn't fit, you have no diagnostic tool, just a vague sense that "something's off in the second act," which is structurally useless.

Truby's seven-step structure works differently. Weakness and need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, new equilibrium. Each step causes the next. Weakness creates need. Need drives desire. Desire creates opponents. You can test every link in the chain: does my character's weakness create this need? Does this need drive that desire? If a link breaks, you know exactly where and why.

I'm AuDHD. If you've ever been told to "just outline" or "just pants it" and neither worked, pull up a chair.

Positional frameworks most writing workshops use (three-act structure, Save the Cat, etc) are like being handed a filing cabinet with labelled drawers but no explanation of the filing system. You can put things in the drawers, but you can't tell if they're in the right ones. For people who need the why before the how (hello, ADHD and autistic brains), this is maddening.

Pantsing isn't the answer, either. My ADHD side loves the freedom, every shiny idea gets chased, every tangent explored. My autistic side is having a slow-building anxiety attack because something's wrong with the system, when in fact, there is no system. I’m pattern-matching against nothing. The result is creative chaos at the 40,000-word mark: too many threads, no hierarchy between them, no way to tell which scenes serve the story and which are beautiful tangents leading nowhere. And that's always the point I get stuck and have to reverse-engineer my story before I can finish it. Total waste of time and energy.

Truby's seven steps aren't positions on an artifical timeline, they're a chain of logic you can test at any point. The four-corner character opposition is essentially systems thinking applied to narrative, which is how many ND brains already process information. And the designing principle (one sentence that governs everything) functions as an executive function anchor. Your brain generates a brilliant idea at 2 AM? Hold it up against the designing principle. Belongs? Keep it. Doesn't? Save it for another book. It doesn't constrain creativity. It tells you which creativity belongs to this story.

What this looks like in practice: you build an organic container, like a skeleton based on character dynamics and causal logic, and then you're wildly, extravagantly creative within it. You can pants individual scenes because the skeleton tells you whether each scene belongs. You can write out of order and still know where every piece fits, because the system is logical, not sequential.

One caveat: Truby's model is front-loaded. It requires significant structural thinking before you write a word of prose, and the wildly creative part of you will want to start writing now. But the payoff is that once the foundation exists, drafting becomes dramatically easier because you always know where you are, why you're there, and whether what you're writing belongs to that story or another story entirely. The front-loading prevents the midpoint chaos.

I’m gradually building my story skeleton. The full walkthrough, with every character death, plot decision, and thematic revelation, is in the community diary. What follows is the spoiler-free version: the method itself, so you can apply it to your own work.

Before you write a word of outline, you need to know what raw material you're working with. For a standalone novel, that means your premise: your entire story compressed into a sentence or two. For a sequel, it's a bit harder: understanding what promises the previous book made to your reader, and what dramatic possibilities those promises opened.

I pulled up every established document, the series dossier, existing outlines, the antagonist tracker, the world-building notes, and re-read all four existing books to answer one question: where did I leave my characters, and how is that unstable?

The series has a governing principle: every victory reveals a deeper horror. Which means any equilibrium at the end of a book is inherently temporary. My job was to find where it cracks.

Your version: Whether you're starting fresh or continuing a series, write down everything your protagonist has at the start of the book. Every resource. Every relationship. Every belief, fear, hope. Then ask: which of these things is a trap?

The designing principle is the concept that took me the longest to understand, and it's the one that changed my writing the most. It's not a logline or a pitch. It's the process of the story stated in one line, the deeper mechanism that makes everything cohere. The designing principle tells you how to tell the story, not just what happens.

This took many iterations. I knew the broad shape of what my protagonist would do, but I kept landing on a trope rather than a principle, something that could describe hundreds of novels. I needed a version that was specific to this character, this world, and this particular moral problem.

A good designing principle should be able to generate the entire novel from itself. Pretty much like a seed. If you write it down and it could apply to dozens of stories, it's not specific enough. If it tells you what happens but not how the story is told, it's a premise, not a designing principle.

If you're neurodivergent, this one-sentence designing principle is your best friend. Write it on a scrap of paper and tape it to your monitor. Every time your brain generates a new idea, hold it up against this line. It's the decision-making filter that works with the tendency to generate rather than against it.

Your version: Write your premise in one sentence. Then ask: what's the deeper process happening underneath this plot? The premise is what happens. The designing principle is why it matters and how it's told. Keep rewriting that one sentence until it feels like a seed that could grow the whole book.

This is where you'll be tempted to rush. Don't. A crack here shows up six months later, and you'll have to sort through the mess. Been there, done that.

I’m working through each step in order: weakness and need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, new equilibrium. And I cross-check every one against the designing principle. The most important thing I discovered: when my protagonist's need and desire were pulling in the same direction, the story felt flat. The moment I found the version where they were in direct opposition, where getting what she wants would prevent her from getting what she needs, the whole structure clicked into place.

Truby is very clear about the distinction: need is internal, hidden from the character. Desire is external, visible to the audience. The gap between need and desire is where your drama comes to life. Without it, you have a character walking toward a goal with no internal resistance, which is a plot summary, not a story.

If you're working with a ND brain, here's where this framework earns its keep. When something feels off, you can trace the chain backwards. Does the opponent attack the protagonist's specific weakness? Does the desire grow from the need? Each link is testable. You're not guessing at vibes. You're debugging a system. And that is a fundamentally different experience from staring at a beat sheet wondering why your second act doesn't work.

Your version: Work through all seven steps. Then read them in sequence. Do they feel like a single organism growing, or like a list of disconnected beats? If the latter, your need and desire are probably misaligned. Go back to Step 1.

The full method continues with four-corner character opposition, moral argument, story world, symbol web, scene design, and building the scene that earns the emotional climax. That walkthrough will be available to all Backstage Pass holders over the coming weeks. Spoiler-free here, all the gory details in the community diary.

And this is just the foundation. The next half year or so will cover writing, revision, editing, and the point where the whole thing almost falls apart. It always does. At least for me.