Here is an upgraded version of the earlier list, plus and minus a few things. I can't promise that this is everything you need - by a very long way - or that there is anything like the required amount of detail here, but hopefully they'll be of use.
1. Decide what you are going to write about. It helps if you can explain this pretty simply: “The adventures of a woman agent sent to help the French Resistance”, or “Five people on a space station become involved in a plot to kill the Martian ambassador”. Sometimes, what seems to be one plot grows into another: “The death of her husband leads the heroine to fulfil her dream of being a world-class painter.” That plot is about the heroine becoming a great painter, not about the death of the husband, although the heroine certainly won’t think so at the start of the book. Ask yourself, seriously, whether this is something about which you want to write 70,000 words. Will you get tired of it halfway through?
2. Decide what sort of story this is. The example about the woman agent helping the Resistance could be a romance with moments of danger, or a full-on action story. The action might be quite light in tone, or desperate and savage. Don’t change halfway through unless you are really good, and even then, you’ll be taking a big risk.
3. What are the important parts of the story, its real moments of change for the people in it? The Resistance may hear about the victory at El Alamein, but it might not mean much to them at all. The harvest failing might be entirely different, though. At what points does the story really change? “Nobody takes Joan seriously until she uses her training to kill a sentry with one blow of the hand.” “Joan realises that Louis is an informant and, despite her feelings for him, exposes him”. That sort of thing.
4. Start with something exciting. None of this “Joan Smith was 23, short, brown-haired, and her Spanish mother had given her a dark complexion”. Start with her doing something: parachuting out of a plane, telling the master spy that she wants to become a secret agent, bribing an informant etc. I like the parachute option. The door opens, and when Joan steps through, she’s in the novel. Bang. You can fill in the details later. Your reader does not have to know everything. It’s often an advantage to leave them with some questions, to make them read on.
5. The same goes with background. Say Joan is about to jump out of the plane. She will not be thinking (or talking, probably) about the Russian Front, the trauma of her mother dying when she was eight, the events of the past year or much besides her mission and making damn sure that her parachute is working. You wouldn’t, would you? Don’t try to smuggle in back-story by having her think about things that the author wants to tell the readers, unless it’s relevant for her to do so at that exact time.
6. Structure. Almost everything in a novel should be an exciting event or leading up to an exciting event. Exciting events are things that matter to the characters and to the outcome of the story. A wedding takes place. Character A realises that he is in love with Character B. A truck breaking down might not be very exciting, but it will be if it’s carrying a consignment of rifles and it packs up in front of an enemy checkpoint. Classically, things are bad at the start of the story, but the characters make progress. About 2/3 to ¾ of the way through, things go wrong, but the characters fight back (only sometimes in a literal way) and the ending resolves the story, usually happily. I don’t think you have to follow this, but it’s a good idea to keep some good, exciting stuff towards the end. Remember, conflict – whether violence, disagreement or yearning for change – is the fuel of the story.
7. Plot. Almost the same thing as structure. Don’t worry if your plot is not incredibly original. It’s what happens along the way – the way that it’s told –that makes the difference. Point Blank, The Crow and Robocop all have very similar basic plots. It doesn’t make them much like each other, though, or equally good.
8. Back-story. Many writers are too worried about this, or are too keen to cram in as much of their carefully-crafted world as they can, to the detriment of the story. “Will they stop reading if I don’t tell them the details of the war in which the Anglo-Martian treaty was signed?” No, but they might stop if the story pauses to go on about things that happened way before the book begins. Sometimes, you can get away with bits of back story, like this: “Joan knew that Pierre was not the only one. Across the whole country, the Militia were making people disappear. In every village she had heard a horror story of some atrocity committed in the name of the New France”. So now we know, assuming that Joan is reliable, that the Militia are evil and powerful. Do we need to know the date when the Militia was established, or the details of how it works? Not unless they impinge on Joan. Otherwise, it’s a secret police force, and the reader will assume that it works like other secret police forces, and that Joan is entitled to thin down its membership.
9. Dialogue. People speak as they are: they need to sound like the sort of person they are meant to be. An intelligent peasant, who is naturally bright but poorly educated, may understand concepts but be bad at expressing them, or have a simple vocabulary. A deceitful minister might sound friendly and clear, but his actions will contrast with his words. Anyone who has seen arguments about social justice on the internet will know that certain topics have their own jargon to the point of being incomprehensible. In our example, the plan that the Maquisards hatch to kill the general might be very complex, but expressed in simple language: “Marie distracts the guards, Pierre opens the signal box and changes the points. Joan sets the charges, then drives to…” Many older books allow characters to make rhetorical speeches off the cuff. Basically, don’t do this unless the characters are very eloquent people, because it looks stilted to a modern eye. Please don’t use dialogue to cram in back-story. “Isn’t it a shame that everyone persecutes us because we are Protestants?” “Yes, if only they understood that Protestantism arises from the growth of the merchant classes two hundred years ago in central Europe, combined with…”
10. Research. You need to sound as if you know what you’re talking about. Know enough to make your world work, but don’t be obvious in showing it. Show what comes up in the course of the story. Where does the ammo go in a Sten gun? Any Resistance fighter knows this. The good ones know that you have to check the workings, because they were made cheaply and sometimes broke. Similarly, would characters in a Regency romance talk about a place in Bath being three blocks or three streets away? In non-realistic situations, everything will need to fit together properly. If every village has its own wizard, do the peasants get diseases anymore? And if not, what happens about the rise in population? Don’t do anything that jars the reader from the story. Remember: good detail, suitably applied, is what makes a setting feel 3D.
11. Endings. An ending ought to satisfy the reader, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to be happy or to answer every question. Endings usually involve the resolution of some sort of conflict, whether in speech or in action. Some books (The Island of Doctor Moreau, say) have the high point of the action and the high point of the dialogue/ideas in different places. Others (High-Rise, say) have an ending that follows the concept and the story inexorably to its conclusion. The conclusion might not be a surprise, but it does round the novel off.
12. Attitude. I have heard some writers talk as if producing a novel is a magical journey in which the “characters lead me” or somesuch. I’ve also heard writers who make writing sound as mechanical as the production of sausages. Neither is right. Writing isn’t pulling levers on a conveyor belt or dropping acid and describing the results. You need inspiration and discipline, the ability to invent things and the skill to control them. And you need to keep writing, keep learning and keep practising. You never get perfect, but you do get better.
