Category: fiction writing
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Friday’s Findings: My 50K Novel Week 1
I’ve decided to prove that I can write fifty thousand words in thirty days on my own — without anyone or any organization giving me a deadline. Here are the parameters I set for myself: Here is how my first week went: Day 1: It’s a Thursday and in the middle of the work week.…
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Friday’s Findings: My First 50K Novel
On Friday, October 31, 2008, I woke up to the radio talking about something called National Novel Writing Month. Write fifty thousand words by the end of November? Impossible! But I wanted to try it because I’m crazy. So, after work that Friday, I checked out the NaNoWriMo website. I spent my time making a…
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Do Your Own 50K Novel
The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) website may be going inactive, but the spirit of NaNoWriMo does not have to die. It’s an opportunity for writers who have participated in the past to write their own fifty-thousand words in thirty days. And it can be any month they want. And they can start on any…
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Friday’s Findings: Write in Chunks. Small Chunks.
Look for those ten-minute gifts of time. Although 10,000 is not a magic number, that’s the number of steps I try to get every day. I used to look for that big chunk of time to get to that mystical numeral. But some days, that just wasn’t possible. By accident, I discovered I can get…
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Friday’s Findings: The Snowflake Method Using Tabs
People have sprinkled various ways to use Randy the Snowflake Method of developing a novel: Excel Spreadsheets; a three-ring binder; Plottr software; and so on. Really, some notebook paper and a pen would be enough. However, a writer who wanted to experiment using the Snowflake Method with different mediums has plenty of options. All of them are…
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Writing and Chaos
“I write late at night, and I always listen to music. I can’t write in silence. I have to have some sort of chaos around me to feed off of.” — Matt Dinniman Photo by Eugene Golovesov My Linktree
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Writing Is Like Driving a Car
“You can’t write and edit at the same time … It’s like driving a car. You can’t drive with your foot on the gas and your foot on the brake.” —Emmy Laybourne Photo by Tobi My Linktree
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Friday’s Findings: Write That Rough Draft with Abandon
How to Silence Your Inner Editor and Finish Your Story “I’ll write something and then throw it away,” someone recently confessed to me. “That’s why I never finish anything I start.” My reaction? Sadness. She didn’t want anyone to see her writing. But who said anyone had to see it? And if it was a…
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Friday’s Findings: Creating a scene palette
When creating a scene for the first time, I have a list. And I try to hit as many points on that list as possible: But before writing the rough draft of a scene, I have practiced a step I got from a thin, little book called Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces by poet…
Andrew M. Friday 