I am on the verge of publishing novels seven and eight of my writing career. I wouldn’t say that I’m anything close to being an expert, but I decided to use my Hurricane Irma downtime to look back on the books I’ve written and the process that I followed.

Step 1 – The Premise

The premise is just a general idea of what a book will be about. I’m going to use my second novel, Let Me Be Frank, as the example for this post.

The premise for this book was simple. I had just binge watched the 1970s television show, Columbo, and I was intrigued by the structure of most of the episodes. The show almost always started with a murder and very often showed the murderer and the method used to do in the victim. It was then up to Lieutenant Columbo to solve the case and…