Your Personal Fiction Factory

The Trellis Method helps you achieve your goal to write a book readers will love.

This overview:

• Describes how the Trellis Method works.
• Suggests adopting and adapting the system.
• That system becomes your personal fiction factory.

The Trellis Method is designed to turn your passions and dreams into the force to write, publish, and promote your book, becoming your personal fiction factory.

Writing a novel needs a framework that supports the growth of your story as it unfolds, and the Trellis Method’s story framework resembles a garden trellis.

• A simple framework that supports growth with vertical and horizontal lattices.
• The Trellis method’s vertical and horizontal framework supports readers’ expectations.
• The structure ties together the many parts of a story to satisfy and exceed the pre-established expectations of readers.

Story Complexity Overwhelms and Frustrates

Readers expect a story to follow the familiar path marked by their favorite genres.

However, that’s not how writers come up with the story concepts and scenes. What started as a solid idea soon turns into a complicated mess of characters and plot events. That mix often overwhelms and frustrates writers.

Worse, that complex mixture of details can steal your motivation and energy, making you feel like giving up on your goal to write a book readers will love.

The Trellis Method Serves as Your Guide

There’s a solution to the problem, 12 steps designed to walk you through from book concept to promotion.

We’ll show you how to adopt and adapt a unique writing system. Turn it into your personal fiction factory. We encourage you to work the steps in the order presented, but once learned, you can use them in any order you choose.

Use the Trellis Method again and again to satisfy your writing goals.

The Trellis Method’s Is the Structure You Need

A trellis provides the structure needed for growth.

• Plot Lens: The vertical framework supports and structures the story’s plot, and serves as your plot lens to view the events that cause character conflicts.

• Scene Lens: The horizontal framework supports and structures the story’s scene flow, serving as your scene lens to view the content flow, emotional intensity, and narrative pace.

• Content Lens: Like a gardener’s trained eyes, you’ll need yet another lens to bring everything into focus and pack into each scene all the details your readers crave. The content lens shows you how and where to tie the combination of story elements and familiar storytelling patterns to the vertical and horizontal frameworks.

Use the Intersection of Lenses to Enhance Quality

The intersection of the three lenses focuses on moving the narrative forward while exceeding readers’ expectations.

Like plants on a garden trellis, scenes vary in shape and size, so how and where you place content influences the narrative.

• The plot lens helps you see where to place the content within the story’s overall framework.
• The scene lens focuses on how to arrange the content flow into short stories that link one to the next.
• And the content lens focuses on packing each scene with the detailed content readers care about.
  • The writer controls gathering and placing the content details.
  • The author’s choices determine the overall story told.

The system of gathering and placing details using prompt-based worksheets turns the writer’s efforts into your personal fiction factory.

Follow the Roadmap to Avoid Issues

Beginner and intermediate writers need a step-by-step guide to take them from conceptualizing to promoting their published book.

The roadmap walks you through the steps, and it starts with the end in mind.

Besides detailed instructions for each step, the Trellis Method shares the time-proven principles — the ‘why’ behind each one.

Plan:

1. Choose Genres: A critical choice required of novelists is the selection of the primary and subsidiary genres that guide your creative process.
2. Validate Premise: 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.
3. Develop Characters: 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.
4. Plot Events: 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.
5. Identify Themes: 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:

6. Outline Beats: Story Beats focus on outlining the patterns found in bestselling novels to deliver plot events that readers expect.

Write:

7. Write Scenes: 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.
8. Edit Drafts: A novel requires careful editing to balance the essential characters, plots, themes, and structure, benefiting from multiple reviews by the author and others before paying for a professional edit.
9. Get Feedback: The process of obtaining constructive insights from others can take many forms, but the best feedback captures objective reactions and actionable suggestions.
10. Finalize Content: After applying the insights and suggestions from feedback, you, along with a small circle of trusted reviewers, will take another look at the content and complete changes as needed.

Publish:

11. Self-publish Book: It’s easier now than ever to self-publish books, and adopting the user-friendly technology can magically transform your writing dream from impossible to possible!

Promote:

12. Promote Book: No one will ever care more about your book than you, and as most writers soon find, promoting your book is as important as writing the novel.

You’ll get hands-on worksheets and illustrations designed to prompt you for input, so you learn while you write.

Way Forward

The Trellis Method makes your passions and dreams the priority.

• Your passions drive your efforts forward and your dreams mark where you want to go.
• The Trellis Method serves as your roadmap and guides you toward your desired writing destination.
• If you come across an unfamiliar term, check out the free yet robust Writing Terms Glossary, and you can submit questions using the Contact form.

No one can promise your book will become a bestseller, but we will show you how to adopt and adapt time-proven writing principles, turning them into your personal fiction factory, so let’s get started.

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