How are you doing? You’ve been prepping for two weeks now and you have a body of work to feel proud of. Give yourself a pat on the back and get ready, because today we’re going to *whispers* outline. Now, you should know that I…
Today is Day 13 of getting ready for Nanowrimo, that activity some of us writers subject ourselves to, trying to write a novel in a month. And today is your LUCKY DAY because we’re going to play a game I like to call “What If?”…
Endings are my nemesis. I am very envious of those of you who breezily say “Oh, I know how it’s supposed to end.” BECAUSE I NEVER DO! So, this year, for my Nano, I made a promise to myself that by gods, I’m going to…
Happy Monday! Monday is a great day to talk about music and mood, and to do that I’ve asked my sister and fellow writer Anne Pinckard to write something. While I love the idea of using music to help my writing, I don’t really have…
You’ve been steadily working every day for ten days now! The sneaky side-effect of this is, it’s building a habit of doing some Nano-related work every day. I find that habit is far more effective for me than discipline when it comes to writing. Discipline…
Happy Saturday, writer friends! If you have the day off today, you might be tempted to spend a LOT of time on writing work. I know I do, any time I’m faced with a stretch of potentially uninterrupted hours, I can start to feel a…
Congratulations, writer! With 15 minutes of prep a day, we have done an hour and forty-five minutes of brainstorming and preparation already for your novel. Today is Friday, and it’s time to rest and recharge. This is a concept I learned from Julia Cameron’s book,…
Are you ready for your next exercise? Let’s brainstorm your character’s emotional arc. You have a character, you have some idea of how they got to be who they are, and yesterday you thought about a problem or flaw. Today we’re going to think about…
Happy Wednesday! How did the freewriting exercise go yesterday? It probably helped you knock a few things loose. If it didn’t, that’s okay. There’s no such thing as wasted writing — all writing is productive, whether it’s practice or self-reflection or, who knows, maybe that…
Today we’re going to think a little more about the character seeds you generated yesterday, so that tomorrow we can put them in trouble. 🙂 For this exercise, we’re going to pick a character from yesterday that resonates with you. I like my heart-broken pianist,…