#FirstDraft60 Day 32 — Friday is SWAT Day!
It’s Friday! It’s also the first Friday of the writing portion of our sixty-day challenge.
Yesterday, I was traveling, so I didn’t really get a chance to write a full post (I had to do it on my phone in the car at a rest stop—thank goodness for technology!) to explain how we’ll be doing our check-ins during this half of the challenge. Every day, I’ll be posting something on the blog and will encourage you to post your daily goal, as well as what you accomplished the day before.
On Fridays, though, I want to know about your full writing week. What were your greatest successes during the week? What was your favorite line/bit that you wrote? What did you learn about yourself, your characters, and/or your story during the week’s work? What are you most proud of yourself for doing this week when it came to your writing? What are you proud of yourself for accomplishing?
In the business world, there’s a planning model called SWOT—which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Around here, we’re going to use SWAT, but we’re going to do it differently, so check in with the following recap for your week:
- Self-Evaluation (how do you think you did? what can/do you want to do differently next week? what did you learn about yourself as a person or as a writer? what didn’t you do or finish that you wanted to? etc.)
- Word count (total for the week, Saturday through today)
- Awesome Accomplishments (breakthroughs, discoveries, highest daily word-count ever, etc.)
- Tidbits too good not to share
If you don’t want to share this stuff publicly, that’s okay. You can add a section to your Story Bible or start a journal (or add this to your existing journal) to keep track of this. But don’t skip doing this—I think that in the future, when you look back either on what you accomplished during this challenge or (heaven forbid) why you gave up on it, the insights you’ll gather later with hindsight on your thoughts during the challenge will be invaluable.
Happy writing!
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KayeDacus.com 
Self-Evaluation: I didn’t get anything done on the first writing day of the challenge. 😦 After only three or four hours of sleep, I spent six and a half hours in the car on Thursday. Then, I had to spend about four hours working. By the time I stopped, I was so exhausted I couldn’t see straight. I did, however, do some brainstorming while in the car, and I woke up this morning thinking about some things that my heroine (now rechristened Meg) could be doing that would freak out the hero (Stone) in a humorous way. So I’m looking forward to working on that this evening.
Word Count: As I mentioned, none yesterday, but I’d planned to spend the first couple of days of the challenge going back through and rewriting/revising the four chapters I’ve already written now that I know my main story conflict and the characters’ internal conflicts, goals, and motivations. So, to be specific: for Day 32 of the challenge, I intend to rewrite/revise at least half (approx. 4,500 words) of the existing writing for this story (which may or may not include writing a new opening scene).
Awesome Accomplishments: As mentioned, I’m now getting to the point at which I’ve figured out enough about the story that I’m starting to wake up in the morning with story ideas. My biggest accomplishment for this past week, though, was figuring out my heroine’s internal conflict, which led to the main conflict for the story.
Tidbits to Share: Though it isn’t written yet, so far, the best tidbit I’ve come up with this week was the idea I had first thing this morning, which was that Stone would find “evidence” of something strange going on with Meg, because for the novel she’s currently working on, she’s pulling out some of the skills and experiments she had to do in college during her undergrad Forensic Science courses—to figure out blood spatter patterns, to see what color and consistency blood would be after 12 hours if someone wrote with it on unpainted drywall, etc. As a former FBI agent, if he saw the remnants of these types of experiments in the Dumpster behind the condo complex, he would definitely be on high alert!
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I made my goal last night (day 31) and was so thrilled!! I did 1,338 in one hour! Didn’t make my goal tonight (day 32), but will try to make up for it over the weekend. Saturday I work 12 hours–we’ll see.
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I should’ve done the format of SWAT. So, here goes:
Self-Evaluation: I did better than I thought. My goal was to type 4 pages (1000 words) without being distracted by my new tv shows and Pinterest! I promised myself that if I could reach my goal, I could reward myself with browsing on Pinterest—for writing related stuff, you know!
Word Count: as mentioned earlier, I did reach my goal and actually wrote 338 extra words–an extra page! Woo-hoo! I was so pleased and even more pleasing was that it was done in one hour!
Awesome Accomplishments: I have an idea of where my story is going and have the ending mapped out as well. I was happy to accomplish putting some notes together and while writing a scene, my heroine, Kate, suddenly surprised me with a tidbit of info that I didn’t know about! I immediately wrote it down and am thrilled because it actually helps me define her internal conflict which kept nagging at me. Something was missing and now it was found!
Tidbits to Share: While planning out Kate (heroine) and Stephen’s (hero) conflicts–both internal and external, and was working on my antagonist’s goal, it dawned on me that I had the wrong character as the antagonist. No wonder my story was stalled! Once I decided that Chandler had to be Stephen’s best friend and that Petra (co antagonist with Chandler) had to be the ONLY antagonist, then pieces of my plotting puzzle were falling into place. It was an epiphany. I was smiling ear to ear. Oh, and one more thing. I currently have a blog that I’ve been ignoring, but now I’m motivated to update it and share my SWAT thoughts on there as well. I can’t wait to work on this story tomorrow,(night), but right now, I need to get to bed. I’m off to work in 8 hours.
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