Category: novel planning
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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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Friday’s Findings: Keeping a Writing Journal
I work as a technical editor for an airline. A year and a half ago, my department moved into the gigantic new hangar the airline built. While I love the new building, I never thought it would help me in my writing. But it does. It just so happens the science fiction novella I’m working…
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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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Some books on writing craft
The Happy Writer by Marissa Meyer is a warm, encouraging guide that helps writers rediscover joy in the creative process by balancing productivity with self-compassion. Through practical advice and personal insights, Meyer reminds authors that success comes not just from word counts, but from cultivating happiness in their writing life. I’ve read two different fiction…
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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…
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Friday’s Findings: Should You Add a Prologue?
Five years ago, I did a series called Writing Style Outcasts. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about one of these misfits of grammar. I’ve discovered the question is not why shouldn’t I use them but is when to use them. I’d like to add prologues to these misfits of the writing craft. A…
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Friday’s Findings: Using Scrivener’s Snapshot Function to Revise
There are a million ways to revise. And there are a million ways to use Scrivener. For my fiction writing, Scrivener offers flexibility and customization. I have found it malleable to fit whatever writing project I am working on at the time. If you haven’t used it, you would too, I bet. No, I’m not…
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The Final Destination
How I’m Designing Resolutions for Every Character in My Series This past week, as I was rewriting scenes for my upcoming novella, Normous, I realized something: I needed to make sure I kept track of where my characters end up at the end of this series. Was I smart enough to keep track of the…
Andrew M. Friday 