When writers ask for a how-to-write-a-book template, what they really need is a writing system, and they get that in the Trellis Method.
By: Grant P. Ferguson
Last Updated: February 18, 2025
The problem is not a lack of information, but too much writing advice without practical writing steps. Most top writers have a step-by-step process that helps them steer around distractions—what I call “life’s potholes.” You need a process you can adopt and adapt, molding the system to your way and style of writing, not the other way around.
That’s the basic writing system I went looking for while recording and curating the best writing techniques top writers already figured out.
Your Essential How-to-Write-a-Book Template
These 7 steps serve as your essential how-to-write-a-book template.
- Choose genres to meet and exceed readers’ expectations.
A critical choice required of novelists is the selection of the primary and subsidiary genres that will guide the creative process.
- Validate premise to set the strategic direction of your story.
A validated premise provides the story’s big picture plus the writer’s development strategy, combining in one sentence the character, plot, theme, symbol, event, and overall, conveys a sense of the outcome — the hero’s change and story’s climax.
- Develop characters who leap from the pages of your novel.
By identifying a character’s personality type, strengths, and preferences, you’ll sense how each fictional person approaches life, such as romantic relationships, career choices, and friendships.
- Plot events that cause characters to react with emotions.
Genres have significant influence over an audience’s pre-established expectations, but it’s how writers turn those familiar aspects into fresh plots and subplots that can surprise and delight readers.
- Identify themes that resonate with your target audience.
It’s often a story’s theme that resonates with readers long after finishing a novel, but there’s not a single method, so you must explore the path that’s right for your story.
- Outline story beats to envision the entire narrative.
Story Beats focus on outlining the patterns found in bestselling novels to deliver plot events that readers expect.
- Write scenes that surprise and delight readers.
Each scene conveys to readers essential characters, settings, and events, and when those sequences are strung together like pearls, they form your story’s narrative necklace.
The essential 7 steps writing system is a detailed how-to-write-a-book template. You adopt and adapt that template, turning the Trellis Method into your personal fiction factory. To publish and promote your book, the bundle supplies steps 8 through 12.
You choose whether the essential 7 steps or the bundle of 12 will help you the most.
Your Future Comes One Choice at a Time
You can scour the internet for freebies, and spend years piecing together your discoveries into your how-to-write-a-book template.
If that’s your choice, I encourage you to go for it. However, if you want to learn while you write, then invest in yourself. Get the Trellis Method and let the system walk you through the steps to complete your book.
- I’ve already done the research for you, curating the best of what bestselling authors already figured out.
- Most importantly, I turned their techniques and tips into prompt-based worksheets so you can write while you learn.
- You adopt and adapt the system, personalizing it to fit your ongoing needs.
These ten two-letter words sum up your decision: if it is to be, it is up to me.
Write Instead of Searching for How to Write
The design of the prompt-based worksheets teaches writing principles while you gather the details to achieve your goal of writing a book readers will love.
If you want to start in the right direction and reach your destination, the Trellis Method is not just convenient, but essential. Life’s distractions will conspire to take you off course, and the template guides you to resume your writing journey where you left off. Best of all, you’ll spend more time focused on key priorities instead of worrying about what to do next.
🔑 The Trellis Method represents the how-to-write-a-book template I went looking for more than a decade ago.
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What do you use for your how-to-write-a-book template?
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