Category: my novel’s progress
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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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Friday’s Findings: Keeping Tabs
How to use tabs in Google.Docs for writers I use Google. Docs for my novel WIPs (Work in Progress) and recently I noticed a new feature on the side of the screen. Tabs. “What are tabs?” Well, I looked it up and found that these tabs can be a great help for organizing a novel.…
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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: My Autodidactic University
Let’s not talk about how long ago I graduated from university. The world is a different place. I studied journalism and then went to art school. I’m embarrassed to say it took me longer than it should to realize this: graduating from high school or college is just the beginning. School’s purpose is to teach us…
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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…
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Friday’s Findings: Discipline Versus Motivation
I usually think of writing as a passive endeavor, but more and more, I’m seeing it as an active fight. This fight has to do with my writing time. I’ve recently come across a few pieces of advice that are all related to fighting for your writing time. Guard your writing time with your life.…
Andrew M. Friday 