Category: discovery draft
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Voices Without Faces: A Dialogue-Only Writing Experiment
I just finished Brandon Sanderson‘s tailored realities. It was not what I thought it would be. Yes, I knew it was a collection of short stories, but with surprise me is the inspiration I found through his writing craft observations. These nuggets of writing wisdom are found in his postscripts after each story. Written by…
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A Small Course Correction
I’ve been doing some thinking about this blog lately, and I’ve come to a realization that probably won’t surprise longtime readers: this space has been trying to be too many things at once.
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Friday’s Findings: Create a Scene Palette
Most writers want their scenes to flow effortlessly on the page, but few scenes actually begin that way. Before the smooth prose and clean structure comes something messier, more playful, and far more effective: scene brainstorming.
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Writing First Efforts
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” — Anne Lamott My Linktree Photo by SIPI SIPI
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What Does NaNoWriMo Look Like Now?
Never fear, the spirit of NaNoWriMo lives on, even if the website is gone. The challenge is to now find your own community to write with, whether that is online or in-person. And of course, you can write by yourself. Whatever your goals have been for the November challenge of writing 50k words, you have…
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Is It Preptober?
Next month will be the first November in decades that the official NaNoWriMo website will not exist. Does this mean no National Novel Writing Month? Will there be a NaNoWriMo community? Should I do NaNoWriMo? I can only speak for myself, but I plan to do NaNoWriMo. Which means this is Preptober. Preptober: It’s a…
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Friday’s Findings: Ask Why
Why Writers Should Ask “Why” Before Writing a Novel Before a writer sketches an outline, builds a character profile, or writes the first sentence, there’s a question worth pausing to ask: Why am I writing this novel? Most of the time, I write for fun. I never think about the why. But I keep coming…
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Test Your Novel’s Potential
“Is my novel idea worth pursuing?” How can you know you will fall in love with your novel without spending hours of writing, stringing together thousands of words, and creating dozens of scenes before realizing it doesn’t work? Try this: Jessica Brody, author of Save the Cat Writes a Novel, recommends just writing the single…
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Friday’s Findings: Your Novel’s Word Count Breakdown
Have you ever asked yourself, “Is my middle too saggy?” Of course, I’m talking about the first draft of your novel. I have several novels in the first draft stage, and I plan to revise them over the next couple of years, Lord willing. Here’s the thing: before I start rewriting them, I want to…
Andrew M. Friday 