Building Your Novel, Step 3: The Foundation (Tips for Discovery Writers)

Learn how to build a solid foundation for your novel as a discovery writer. Explore character-based, situation-based, and setting-based foundations with practical exercises.

You’ve got your ideas. You’ve collected your materials. Now, you need to figure out what your novel is actually about. At least, that's what the novel rests on. The foundation, to keep playing out the metaphor.

Every building needs a foundation. So does your novel. This doesn’t mean plotting out the entire story. It means identifying the core elements that everything else will build upon. For discovery writers, this is crucial. Without at least knowing what you’re building on, you might end up with a pile of scenes instead of a novel. (Just as a side note, eventually in revision, you’ll want each scene to move the story forward. A sense of progression is essential. But more on that later.)

Your foundation will be a combination of character, plot and setting and their interaction in your story. Often it will start with your character in a situation that is set in a specific place (fantastic, realistic, horrific etc.) and expand from there.

Let’s break it down:

Character-Based Foundation: 

Maybe you can’t stop thinking about a particular character. You hear their voice in your head. You know how they’d react in different situations. Their personality feels real to you.

This was the case with the first novel in my Strangely Scary Funny series, The Librarian of the Haunted Library. I knew I had this young man, who had special magical abilities and had grown up in foster care and wanted to escape the small town he was in. I knew that he would go to New Orleans first, but that was just the beginning of his journey. Did I know what the journey was? Big fat NO. I was surprised where the novel went after that, but it began with this idea of my protagonist being a potential hero on a journey.

If your foundation is character, spend time understanding who they are. Not their favorite color or what they eat for breakfast—unless those details reveal something essential. Understand what they want. What they fear. What they believe about themselves that is and isn’t true. What wound from their past still shapes their decisions. Go after their core beliefs and disbeliefs.

You don’t need to write this all down in some character bible. Just think about it. Daydream about them. Let them become real to you as you write. AS YOU WRITE. You’re a discovery writer. Discover.

Situation-Based Foundation:

Sometimes what grabs you isn’t a character but a situation—a problem, a mystery, a conflict that demands resolution.

“What if a man woke up as a giant insect?” That situation was all Kafka needed to write “The Metamorphosis.” From this foundation, he built the kind of character this might happen to and the theme of his story. A character in a situation. This is something I almost always get to as I’m constructing my novel.

“What if dinosaurs were brought back to life in the modern world?” That question was the foundation of Jurassic Park. It needed the right cast of characters to make it interesting and compelling. It needed the right story to keep the suspense moving things forward. That will come as you build the novel.

If your foundation is a situation, spend time exploring the implications. Who would be most affected by this situation? Why does it matter? What are the stakes? What complications might arise?

Setting-Based Foundation: 

Sometimes the foundation is a place—real or imagined—that feels alive with story potential. A small town in the South with good and bad people in it but with mostly average people, part good and part bad, stuck in their prejudices. A white woman accuses a Black man of raping her. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

Middle-earth was Tolkien’s foundation. The haunted Overlook Hotel was King’s foundation for The Shining. Possibly their stories focused on those settings to get their stories moving. At the very least, you can see that a great deal of the story happens because of the unique and powerful settings.

If your foundation is setting, explore that world. What are its rules? Its history? Its secrets? What kind of people inhabit it? What conflicts naturally arise there?

Let’s say you want to write a novel about a city where memories can be extracted, bottled, and consumed by others. That’s an interesting setting. Now you start deciding other things. Do you want this to be a fantasy or Scifi novel? Do you want it to be comic in tone or dramatic? What kind of character do you want to move the novel in this world? What tension can you establish early on? There are so many ways to go from this simple beginning.

Here’s the thing about foundations: they need to be solid, but they don’t need to be complete. You don’t need to know everything about your character, situation, or setting before you start. You just need to know enough that it feels real and generative to you. In other words, you can build on it!

How do you know when your foundation is strong enough? When it starts generating questions you’re eager to explore. When it suggests conflicts and complications. When it feels like it contains multitudes.

For discovery writers, the trick is finding the balance between having enough foundation to build on and remaining open to discovery. Develop your core element just enough that it can support a story, then start writing to see what emerges.

Some practical approaches:

For character foundations: Write a scene showing your character in a moment of conflict, even if that scene never appears in your novel. See how they react under pressure.

For situation foundations, write out the ripple effects of your central situation. Who benefits? Who suffers? What unexpected consequences might emerge?

For setting foundations: Write a brief history of your setting, or describe how different types of people experience it differently.

None of these exercises should take more than an hour. They’re not about planning your novel; they’re about making your foundation solid enough to support the weight of a story.

Remember, you’re not trying to figure out the whole novel at this stage. You’re just making sure the ground under your feet is stable before you start building walls.

Many new writers make the mistake of trying to develop everything equally from the start—character, plot, setting, theme. That’s overwhelming and unnecessary. Focus on your foundation first. Let the rest emerge as you write. Also, be open to changing everything. That’s part of writing a discovery draft. Don’t forget this aspect. Nothing is written in stone unless you happen to write in stone. Which would be weird and cumbersome. Not advisable.

The beauty of this approach is that it plays to the strengths of discovery writers. We’re good at following threads, making connections, finding patterns as we go. But we need the solid start to ground us.

So, develop your foundation just enough. Then start building and see what happens.

My Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Brian-Y...

I’ve published over twenty novels as an independent writer and had five novels traditionally published. My Strangely Scary Funny series is my most popular. It has twelve novels. I’ve earned over six figures with that series so far. I’ve never written any of these novels using a detailed outline. If you’re struggling because you think you have to be able to write an outline to write a novel, I’m here to tell you, brothers and sisters, you do not.

In the first novel in my series, I wrote thinking that I was just going to write whatever I felt like and not worry about where it went in my first draft. I wrote it fast. I tried not to think too much. I tried to let my subconscious and intuition push it forward. Even after I’d rewritten it a few times, I wasn’t sure what it was (humorous, yes, but horror, fantasy, urban fantasy, supernatural? It seemed to have a lot of genres in it), but I thought it was pretty good whatever it was. The first two reviews were terrible, and I thought, well crap. But then people started writing reviews about how much they loved the weird and unique writing and story. So then I thought, well okay, maybe I do have something here. It now has over 3000 reviews and well over a thousand five- star reviews. The second novel in the series has over 1000 reviews. I’m still not sure what it is, but whatever it is, it’s uniquely mine.

Write what you love to write. Trust your instincts in the first draft. Revise. Be more critical in revision, but be careful not to kill what makes your writing uniquely yours. Then rewrite again. Then, hope for the best and get started on your next novel as soon as you can.

Good luck!