Chapter 2: Your Image Bank

The best way to set your book up for success

The Image Bank is one of the most powerful tools I’m going to give you in this book. Not only is creating your Image Bank a way to take your potential hook for a spin and see how much you like being behind the wheel, it’s also the task that coalesces your hook from an exciting but amorphous inspiration, into something concrete and actionable. More than that, it is the creation of a resource that you will use throughout the entire process of plotting and writing your book. In fact, it’s so transformational that I’m going to recommend that every time you sit down to begin a new book, your first step should be creating an Image Bank.

Based on the above paragraph, you may be thinking that the task I’m setting before you is something lengthy and laborious, for which you had better clear your calendar. The opposite is true. The creation of your Image Bank will be simple, fun, and you’ll immediately start seeing its power.

So what's an Image Bank already?

The Image Bank is your storage space for the ideas you’ll use in your novel. As you are plotting, you’ll come up with little bits of magic—scenes that pop into your head, which you don’t know where to put yet; fascinating characters who have, as yet, no role in your story; little bits of dialogue that you don’t want to forget. It would be wonderful if you could keep all your inspirations for your novel in your head, but you can’t—and so you need a common place to store them. That’s your Image Bank. You can use any recording format you want: index cards, a notebook, a Word file. I recommend a spreadsheet, and we'll get into why that is later.

As you’re writing, ideas will start occurring to you organically, but to get started, we’re going to prime your Image Bank by creating a few simple lists.