The first key to writing a novel is ability to dream and imagine. Think back to when you were a little child and dreamed. Your imagination took you to places you've never been before. It made you do things you never thought you could do. Having superpowers...being in strange places...the conditions are limitless. Writing a novel is actually imagination translated into words. You close your eyes and let your thoughts drift while creating a web of consequential ideas. Afterwhich, you write them down on paper.

The second key to writing is formulating premise of your novel. Let's say you'd start with a huge asteroid moving about in space. Then suddenly it collided with another asteroid and instantly created an explosion. Some of explosion's debris fell down into earth's atmosphere. By accident a person comes in contact with it. These sequence of events could be your initial start in which you let your mind take hold of and run with to produce succeeding events.

a) Work processes such as incremental production produce more output than a "do your best" approach. Writing four pages a day completes a words-on-paper first draft screenplay in one month. A "do your best" or "waiting for inspiration" approach can take months or years.

b) Work processes such as separating creative from critical thinking allow build up of large idea pools using creative thinking and reduction of those pools into feasible ideas using critical thinking.

c) Frameworks reduce complex problems into their component intellectual parts. For example, story structure can be reduced to three or four acts or The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1973). Frameworks increase output by reducing complex problems into smaller, more manageable problem solving exercises. In screenwriting, frameworks tell writer where to start, where to finish, what to write and what should be happening at a particular stage of story.

Additionally, a structured approach improves performance in a number of ways, including: