How is your challenge going after the second day of writing? Have you hit a stumbling block already (I did—I missed yesterday’s goal by 844 words).

On Thursdays, we’re going to do an alternate version of Timer Tuesday—this time, instead of challenging ourselves to sit at the computer and try to crank out as many words as fast as we can, the challenge is to get away from the computer.

What Does THORsday Mean?
It’s pretty simple. Our writing challenge for today is:
Timed
Handwritten
Offline
Remote

Otherwise, try to follow all of the same tips that we use for regular 1k1hr writing sprints. (Refresher here.)

Assignment: Leave a comment with your THORsday goal—when, where, and for how long do you plan to do your handwritten challenge today?

Have you already started? Are you geared up and champing at the bit, waiting for your lunch break or for the end of the work day in order to get started writing?

IT’S TIMER TUESDAY!
#1k1h Sprint from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM US Central time*.

*To determine the time of the 1k1hr sprint in your time zone, go to the Time Converter website by clicking the image above and inputting my time (as Nashville or Central Time as shown) on the left, and your city/location on the right. For example, 8:30 PM Tuesday 11/1 in Nashville is 12:30 p.m. Wednesday 11/2 in Sydney, Australia.

Even though it’s the first day, that doesn’t keep it from being Timer Tuesday. Now, for myself, I have added at least one #1k1h for almost every day in November. But Tuesdays are our days to make a concerted effort to do at least one as part of our writing time. Now, just in case you’ve forgotten since Friday . . .

Happy writing! (And don’t forget to check in.)

We’ve gone through twenty-nine days of prep work in order to get us, hopefully, to the point at which we’re more prepared to sit down and start writing a story than we’ve ever been in our lives. But if you’re anything like me . . . you’ve probably fallen a bit behind on the planning. (I will be spending my writing time today finalizing my hero’s backstory and then working on my premise, plot, and story summaries. And, hopefully, discovering my heroine’s real name so I can stop referring to her by her code name!)

Today is the last day of preparation before we set everything else aside—all the research, all the character casting/development, all the outlining, all the pre-plotting, all the world building—and start writing. So what is more natural to focus on today than how we’re going to start writing that story?

Writing Your Opening Scene(s)
The first five pages. Hooking the reader. Crafting a killer opening. Writing a gripping first chapter.

If there’s a book about the writing craft, there’s likely going to be a chapter—or a whole section—on the importance of a strong opening line/scene/chapter. Actually, there are entire books focused on just writing the openings (yet none that I’ve found that focus on writing a killer ending). Rather than repeat everything that’s already been written about crafting the “perfect” opening scene, let’s discuss what it means to sit down and write an opening scene—or a dozen—for the book you’ve been preparing to write for the last 30 days.

Don’t Lock Yourself into Your First Opening Scene/Chapter

Like everything else in what you’re about to write, the first scene/chapter you’re about to sit down and put into words is a first draft—it’s open for revision, rewriting, or cutting along with everything else you’re about to put down on paper.

Don’t fall so helplessly in love with the idea of writing the perfect opening scene that you can’t move ahead and write the rest of the story. You can always fix it later.

Write More Than One Opening Scene

A great way to keep from falling into the “precious baby” mindset with your “perfect” opening scene is to write more than one. If you have more than one viewpoint character, this is easier than if you only have one. And if you have more than two viewpoint characters, it’s that much better. Write an opening scene from each viewpoint character’s POV. Give each character a setup and an inciting incident. It may be the same inciting incident for all of your characters (and in a romance novel, it’s when the heroine and hero meet, so it’s the same scene but from each viewpoint). If you have multiple plotlines in your story, you may have a couple of different inciting incidents, and this exercise will help you figure out which is the primary/dominant plotline, which will help you hone in on which opening scene may work best for your story.

And if all else fails, send your character to the grocery store. You never know whom he/she might run into there!

Don’t Get It “Perfect”; Just Get It Written

It’s almost 99% certain that no matter how much you obsess over writing the “perfect” opening, by the time you get to The End, you’re going to need to either change, rewrite, or scrap your opening scene. By giving yourself permission just to get started and get something written so that you can actually get your entire draft completed, you’re less likely to give up because you feel like you’ll never be able to get it right.

Whatever you do, just get SOMETHING written. Start writing. Go back to what we discussed last week about allowing yourself to be in draft writing mode. At this point, it isn’t important to get it right, just to get it written.

Not Sure Where to Start Your Scene? Start in the Middle

Because it’s been drilled into our heads so often to open with a hook, the draw the reader in right from the first line, we tend to obsess over those opening words—are they active enough? Do they pack a punch? Are they memorable?

Just write!

Assignment: Go back and review all of the prep work you’ve done. Spend your writing time today reviewing everything you’ve put into your Story Bible and seeing if there are any gaps/holes you can fill in on this last day before we start writing. Then, if you’ve done all that and you still have some time left, start jotting down some ideas for your opening scene(s).

For Discussion: Are you ready to write? What are your biggest concerns going into the 30-days-of-writing part of the challenge? Is there any part of the prep work you feel like you need to go back and work on a little more in order to be better prepared? Now that you’ve completed the 30 days of prep work, do you feel differently about starting to write this story than you have about writing in the past?

On Sundays, we take a moment to step back and think about our writing from a wider view. Below the schedule for the upcoming week are questions to help you reflect on what you’ve done up to this point—feel free to answer them here with as much or little detail as you’d like; or answer them on your own blog or on Facebook. Or just write the answers down in a private journal or notebook. The important thing is to actually think through and write down your answers.


Reflections for Day 29

A. What is your physical writing space?

1. Where is your physical writing space? What are its boundaries? Have you made it a “sacred” space (i.e., do others in your household know not to disturb you when you are working in that space)?
2. Is your writing space distraction-free? Are the surfaces free of clutter? Is it clean? Is there anything in or about the physical space that could be or become a distraction for you if you find yourself having difficulty focusing on writing?
3. What can you make sure you do have in your physical writing space that will assist you in being able to focus and not get distracted?

B. What is your mental writing space?

1. What time of day can you best focus on writing?
2. What time of day to you feel most creative?
3. What type of environment is least distracting to your mind? Do you need quiet? Music? Soft lighting? Bright light? Do you get less distracted when you’re sitting upright in an office chair at a desk, or with a lapdesk slouched down in bed?
4. What can you do to train yourself to be able to write in any environment?
5. What images, sounds, smells, or other factors are relaxing and/or put you in a creative frame of mind?
6. How can you silence your internal editor and just let the creative side out to play? What Creative exercises could you do for ten or fifteen minutes before your writing time starts in order to get the creative juices flowing?
7. Have you done enough prep work on your story to start writing with the confidence that you have a clear enough picture of where the story is going that you aren’t going to get “stuck” once you reach a certain point?

I look forward to seeing your answers and will be posting mine soon.

Next Tuesday, we begin the marathon thirty-day writing portion of this sixty-day challenge. Hopefully you already set your total word-count goal and broke that down into digestible daily goals. (If you haven’t, now would be a good time.) We’ve already discussed the difference between draft writing and regular writing—focusing on draft writing for this challenge in order to get our speed up. But one of the most helpful things to get through a marathon writing challenge is scheduled, one-hour writing “sprints.”

#1k1hr = 1,000 Words in One Hour
If you’re on Twitter and if you follow other writers, you may have seen the #1k1hr (or #1k1h) tag and wondered what it meant. I did a bit of research (okay, I Googled for about ten minutes) and couldn’t track down the originator of this hashtag, but it’s been around for years. And it’s something that I found quite helpful in the years when I had to complete a 90–100k manuscript every three to four months.

Well, yes and no.

What if I’ve never been able to write 1,000 words in one hour?

In one hour, if you’ve prepared, planned, and organized ahead of time, most writers can easily write 1,000 words or more. But not everyone can do this. Sometimes, no matter how well-prepared we are, the words just won’t come. And some people will never be fast writers.

Fifteen years ago, when I was writing what would become my first completed manuscript, I got to a point at which (being a seat of the pants writer with no synopsis, only a vague story idea) I had no idea where my story was going. But I needed to write. So since I’d just gone to the grocery store that evening after work, I wrote one of my characters doing the same thing. I had him get his basket. I had him pick out produce. I got him through the store all the way to the frozen-food section—where, surprisingly, he ran into another major character; and, all of a sudden, I had a scene that moved the story forward again.

It sounds mundane and like bad writing to just wing it like that and make up some random situation that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story (and it’s probably something you’d end up cutting most of in a revision), but not only are you working at that creative pump, you can also learn more about your character by doing something like that.

For Discussion: How much prep work do you still need to do before you’re ready to start sprinting toward a marathon finish?

Whether it’s figuring out where an event could be held, what the weather is like in a certain timeframe, whether or not your state has imminent domain laws, or specific details of an obscure battle five hundred years ago, you’re going to have to look stuff up. And what better time to do it than now, before you start trying to churn out 1,500 to 2,500 words per day?

We’re told to write what we know. But that advice is more about taking what we know and extrapolating it into other situations, rather than just about the specific things we’ve experienced in our lives. “Write what you know” is one of the most misunderstood instructions given about writing. Most people take it at face value, interpreting it as, “Write about only what you have personally done or experienced in the confines of your own life.” If fiction writers were to interpret it this way, we would eliminate entire genres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical, and 99% of mystery/crime/suspense/thriller. There would be no Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, no Luke Skywalker, no hobbits and Middle Earth, no Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, no Scarlett O’Hara, no Sherlock Holmes, no James Bond or Jason Bourne, no Superman or Batman, and no one would have ever heard of a man named Stephen King.

Figure Out What You DON’T Know
Hopefully, as you’ve been going through and doing the exercises over the past three weeks, you’ve been doing research as you go. For example, in trying to write out my heroine’s backstory, I needed to know where her father (a Royal Navy officer) could be stationed and what he could be doing as a spy/spymaster for the War Department during all those years. So I did this:


Now, back toward the beginning of this year, when I first started working on this story idea, I knew I wanted it set in the months leading up to the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, one of the seminal Naval battles in the Napoleonic War. But all of the research that I did for the Ransome Trilogy was focused on 1814 and the short-lived peace after many, many years of war and before the final battle of Waterloo. A lot of things were different, not only for my characters, but also for the Royal Navy and for England herself in the nine years between these settings/events. So while I had a basic knowledge that the Battle of Trafalgar happened in October 1805, it was a surprising but decisive victory for Britain, and it’s the battle in which Admiral Horatio Nelson lost his life aboard HMS Victory, I didn’t really know much about what the immediate events were leading up to it or how those might work for my story. So, back then, I did this:


Even if you’re writing a contemporary novel set in the city/neighborhood where you live, you’re still going to find that there are things you’re going to have to research. And it’s to your advantage before a marathon writing challenge like this one or NaNo to get as much research done as possible beforehand.

Assignment 1: If you haven’t already, add a RESEARCH section to your Story Bible.

In the Research section of my Story Bible, I already have a few pages:

At this point, this is all just general research—topics I think I might need information on in order to write this story. But because I’m still deep in trying to figure out exactly where my story is going (mostly on land and staying in Europe vs. mostly at sea and sailing to Madeira and then Barbados) and what actual historical events my characters might take part in, I’m not necessarily sure exactly how specific I need to get with this research. Which leads me to . . .

Assignment 2: After reviewing your character backstories/information, your premise, outline, and everything else you’ve already created, create pages in the Research section of your Story Bible for all of the specific subjects which you think you might need to research—and start gathering research!

If you’ve already done some research, or at least gathered resources (like a bookmarks folder in your web browser where you’ve been saving links to websites), go ahead and add those to your Research section. If you realize that there are some important topics/issues/laws/historic details/etc. that you’re going to need to research, go ahead and create pages for them, even if they’re blank. Having them there whenever you look at that section will remind you of the research you need to do. For example:


For Discussion: How much research do you need to do in the next six days (counting today!) before we start writing?

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Do you know enough about your setting to be able to write a first draft without the setting becoming a stumbling block for you?

Do You Know Your Setting?
I’m not just talking about knowing where your story is physically taking place. What I’m asking is how much you know about your setting.

Assignment 1: If you didn’t already do it in Week 1, add a SETTING section to your Story Bible. Then ask yourself (and write down your answers to) the following questions:

1. Does your setting have a unique culture (traditions, observances, taboos, quirks, etiquette) that can play a role in your story?
   Think of places that have cultures that are unique to them: Santa Fe, Greece, Louisiana, Las Vegas, the Deep South, Hawaii, a small fishing town on the coast of Ireland, a ship of the line in the 19th century Royal Navy, etc. What are the unique elements of a setting that you can incorporate into your characters’ background/mannerisms/behavior and into how your story unfolds?
2. What are the elements of the culture you need to make sure you get absolutely right?
   If you’ve read my Bonneterre books, you know I don’t have people walking around calling each other cher or babbling in Cajun French. If you live somewhere with a unique culture and watch movies/TV shows set there, what are the things that they get wrong that drive you crazy? How can you make sure you get those elements right?
3. What are some specific locations and/or events you can incorporate into your story?
   In the Matchmakers series, set in Nashville, I have my girls meet for coffee on Sunday afternoons at The Frothy Monkey in the 12 South neighborhood. In the Bonneterre series, with my fictional setting, I created Beignets S’il Vous Plait, a beignets-and-coffee shop reminiscent of Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans or Coffee Call in Baton Rouge. Use specific locations, but have a reason for using those locations. Don’t just “name drop.”
4. How can your setting affect how your story plays out?
   For example, if you’re writing suspense and your characters are on the run outdoors, they’re going to run into much different conflicts in a mountainous area than in a desert than in a jungle. Is it cold and snowy? hot and humid? Does your character have environmental allergies that could affect whether or not he’s able to do the physical activities required of him in the plot? Is he a sailor who suffers from seasickness? Someone who works in mountain search and rescue who suddenly gets a bad case of vertigo?
5. What’s the “mood” of your setting?
   Think about the cliche of the gothic novel being set in a creepy, dark, old castle with a labyrinth of hallways, tunnels, and dungeons. There’s a reason why it’s become cliche—because it works. One of my favorite YA novels from childhood is a gothic, but it’s set in a recently built Victorian mansion in Northern California in the late 1800s. The author uses the house, and the fog that envelops it daily, to great effect. How can the weather, the landscape, the culture of your setting affect and effect the mood of your story?

Getting Specific with Your Setting
In addition to knowing the tone and mood and culture of your setting, you need to know as many specifics as possible—even if it doesn’t show up in the story. You need to be an expert. You need to know more about your storyworld than anyone else. If it’s a real city and you don’t live there, natives of that city need to think you’re one of them when they read your book. There’s nothing worse than picking up a book that’s set in a place you’re intimately familiar with and finding errors, cliches, “misplaced” landmarks, stereotyped locals, etc., within. (Especially for someone like me who lives in a city like Nashville that is SO different for those of us who live here than the reputation/stereotype that most people think of.)

Assignment 2: Add a chart (or pages, if you have lots of information in these categories) to your Settings section of your Story Bible to record/collect the following information about your setting.

For Discussion: What did you learn about your setting doing through this exercise that will make writing your first draft easier? What do you feel like you still need to know about your setting before you start writing A WEEK FROM TODAY?

Learn more about developing your setting here.