#FirstDraft60 Day 44 — Weekly Story Bible Check-Up
In order to be able to focus on writing as much as we can on a daily basis, keeping our Story Bibles updated is going to be important. So on Wednesdays, be sure to schedule additional time to review your Story Bible and see what needs to be updated or revised.
Since Story Bibles can start to get kind of massive, here are the sections to focus on reviewing/updating this week:
- Secondary/Minor Characters
- Props/Costumes
- Research
- Revisions section
- Style Guide
- Synopsis/Outline (in case your recent writing has made you think of any new scenes/plot points you want to add—or realize that some of the ones you thought of before you started writing no longer work).
And don’t forget to check in with your writing progress!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 35,000 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 43 — Timer Tuesday (#1k1h Sprint Day)
If you haven’t yet participated in a 1k1h writing sprint during this challenge, you may not have had the chance yet to discover just how much you can do when you push yourself to focus solely on writing for a solid hour. These one-hour sprints can help build word count and our story’s momentum when doing a marathon writing challenge like this. On Tuesdays, the challenge will be scheduling and completing at least one 1k1h writing sprint some time during the day.
Today, I will be doing two 1k1h sprints and will start and end them on Twitter using the #FirstDraft60 hashtag at 3:30 p.m. (Central) and 7:00 p.m. (Central).
I’d love to make these writing sprints (or at least one a week) a “team” effort with as many of you participating as possible. The more support (and accountability) there is, the more successful we’ll all be! But if those times don’t work for you, go ahead and pick the times that work best for you.
1k1h Tips for Success
- Let anyone within your household know that you need one uninterrupted hour to try to head off at the pass any interruptions.
- Set a timer. This is most important. Don’t do this by just watching the clock. You’ll find yourself only watching the clock and not getting anything written. Setting a timer allows you to forget about the time and concentrate fully on writing.
- Prepare yourself before starting your timer. Re-read the last few pages you wrote (without editing/revising!) to get your head back into the story and figure out where you need to pick up. Review your outline and/or character pages in your Story Bible. And then put all of that away so you don’t use those to procrastinate during the hour.
- If you listen to music while writing (I recommend instrumental so that you don’t get distracted by the lyrics), have it set up and playing before starting your timer. Use earphones, even if you’re working at home, to block out any sounds that might pull you out of your story.
- If you can’t listen to music while writing, I recommend wearing the earphones anyway. People are less likely to interrupt you (at home or working somewhere like a coffee shop) if you have them in/on—and they help block out those distracting sounds.
- Make sure your writing space (both physical and mental) is set up and ready to go before you start your timer.
- In other words, make sure that about five to ten minutes before you start the 1k1h sprint, you’re in the process of getting ready to write.
- Silence or turn off your cell phone (unless you’re using it as your timer—then don’t turn it off). Close your Internet browser. Close Facebook and Twitter (as soon as I give the “start” signal, of course). Close your email program if you use something like Outlook that isn’t web-based. Eliminate all distractions!
Don’t Know How to Start Writing?
If you aren’t sure how to start writing when the hour starts, even after re-reading what you’ve previously written, here are a few suggestions.
- Which character had the viewpoint in the last scene you wrote? Start with a different character in this scene.
- Still not sure what to write? Try this prompt:
Character walked into the room. Character saw a piece of paper tacked to the wall on the other side of the room. Character walked across the room and took the piece of paper down. Character read the piece of paper. The piece of paper said . . . - If that prompt doesn’t work, try the exercise of taking your character to the market to buy food.
- If you can’t think of what the “next” scene is that comes after the one you just left off with in your previous writing session, start writing something you know comes later in the story that you already have a good idea for. Though I recommend writing your story in linear fashion (from beginning to end) instead of jumping around, sometimes you need to write stuff that comes later if you already have a clear idea of the scene in your head, just to make sure you don’t lose it. And that can also help you figure out what comes between what you’ve written so far and that future scene and help you to fill in the gap next time.
Hopefully, I’ll “see” you at 3:30 and 7:00 (Central) this afternoon/evening. If not, don’t forget to check in with your progress and how you do with your own 1k1h sprint(s) today!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 32,500 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 42 — Monday Motivation from Brad Herzog
On Mondays, I’m going to share some writing advice/motivation from authors who may be well known to you, or whom you may never have heard of. Hopefully, you’ll find inspiration or a new way of looking at or thinking about writing from these little clips.
Today, our Monday Motivation is a TED talk on capturing creative ideas from bestselling nonfiction and children’s book author Brad Herzog:
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Hope you’re doing well with your writing. Don’t forget to check in with your progress!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 30,000 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 39 — Friday is SWAT day! Check in with Your Project
It’s Friday! That means it’s time to check in with your progress in the challenge.
On Fridays, 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!
#FirstDraft60 Day 38 — Thursday Craft Day: Creating Tension and Upping the Ante for your Characters
On Thursdays throughout the writing portion of the challenge, I’m going to focus on an area of craft that, unlike some, will actually help you in getting your draft written, instead of making you want to go back and revise what you’ve already written. Today, let’s get some tension up in here!
You hear and read lots about crafting great scene openings and endings. But what about what happens in the middle of a scene? How do you make sure you’re carrying through with the dynamics of a powerful opening and an ending hook?
Tension and Pacing in the Middle of a Scene
Scene middles are the bulk of your story, so use and craft them wisely.
You must complicate your characters’ lives, and you must do it where the reader can see it: in scenes. Doing this is known as upping the ante.
Once you know what your character’s goal for the scene is, you must determine what Jack Bickham (Scene and Structure) calls the “disaster” that will happen at the end of the scene to keep them from reaching that goal. It’s not a disaster in the literal sense, but an obstacle that puts your character further into the hole of narrative debt; it’s a a setback, a redirection.
In other words, you’re starting the scene out with a question: Can the character do/attain this? The middle of the scene is all about setbacks and building narrative debt in the quest to answer this question.
What is narrative debt?
With simple narrative debt, the debt is paid off by the end of the scene; in other words, the question is answered, the conflict managed/solved before the next scene/chapter starts. The lost dog is found, the contract on the house comes through, the long-anticipated event goes well.
But the underlying foundation of story plots is compound narrative debt—some conflicts or questions linger and the interest compiles and compiles until you have to pay it off or risk losing your reader. This is like maxing out a credit card and then only paying the minimum payment each month. Yes, you’re keeping your account alive and in “good standing” but you’re not paying it off.
Take, for instance, the suspense genre. Not only are there going to be breathtaking, spine-chilling scenes where our heroes or heroines are in peril, but then—whew!—are safe again, there is an undertone—an increasing narrative debt—of unease or fear that pervades the entire narrative. Even when things seem to be going well, the reader can sense something isn’t quite right. This can be done through tone—through the words the writer chooses to use in the narrative. It’s like the duh-dut, duh-dut of the theme song for the movie Jaws. When first watching the movie, you may not even notice the score. But then subconsciously, every time that music starts, you know something bad is going to happen.
Even though we want to avoid both of them in real life, in writing we want both types of debt—the simple debt to keep the reader satisfied with little payoffs that keep the story moving forward, along with the compound debt that keeps the reader turning pages because they have to find out how the ultimate debt of the story will be paid off.
As we solve conflicts or answer questions in our narrative, we should always keep in mind how these solutions/answers feed into the compounding narrative debt. The best way to do this is to create new conflicts or questions from the resolution of the one that came before. If the heroine gets out of one scrape, the escape may create two new ones down the road.
Remember Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong will go wrong—and this is what happens in the middle of a scene.
Raising the Stakes
Donald Maass in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook explains “the essence” of raising the stakes as “making things worse, showing us that there is more to lose, promising even bigger disasters that will happen if the hero doesn’t make matters come out okay.” This can be on a global scale (think of all of the villains bent on world destruction that James Bond defeated) or it can be on an individual scale (will Maria stay at the abbey or will she return and declare her love for Captain von Trapp?).
In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein writes that “the essence of plotting [is] putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. . . . One way to plan is to think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist.”
So how does this apply to the manuscript you’re writing right now?
What is the main conflict for each of your main characters? How can you make the problem worse?
For a great example of this, follow Frodo’s journey from the Shire to Mount Doom. Every time something happens to him, we think that nothing else worse could happen, but it always does.
Is there another character (whether good or bad) in your story that has the ability to keep your main character from achieving his or her goal?
If the character must be somewhere at a certain time to stave off worldwide disaster, how many things can you think of to stop the character from getting there on time?
In other words, what are some roadblocks you can throw in your characters’ way to thwart their goals and to raise the tension in the middle of your scenes (and your story)?
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Works cited:
Bickham, Jack M. Scene and Structure. Cincinnati, OH: Writerʼs Digest, 1993.
Maass, Donald. Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook: Hands-on Help for Making Your Novel Stand out and Succeed. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest, 2004.
Stein, Sol. Stein on Writing. New York: St. Martins, 1995.
#FirstDraft60 Day 37 — Weekly Story Bible Check Up
In order to be able to focus on writing as much as we can on a daily basis, keeping our Story Bibles updated is going to be important. So on Wednesdays, be sure to schedule additional time to review your Story Bible and see what needs to be updated or revised.
Since Story Bibles can start to get kind of massive, here are the sections to focus on reviewing/updating:
- Backstory, GMC, and Description pages for the main character(s).
- Settings section
- Timeline section
- Revisions section
- Style Guide
- Synopsis/Outline (in case your recent writing has made you think of any new scenes/plot points you want to add—or realize that some of the ones you thought of before you started writing no longer work).
And don’t forget to check in with your writing progress!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 17,500 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 36 — Timer Tuesday (#1k1h Writing-Sprint Day)
Last week, we discussed 1k1h writing sprints and how useful they can be in helping us build our word count and our story’s momentum when doing a marathon writing challenge like this. On Tuesdays, the challenge will be scheduling and completing at least one 1k1h writing sprint some time during the day.
Today, I will be doing two 1k1h sprints and will start and end them on Twitter using the #FirstDraft60 hashtag at 3:30 p.m. (Central) and 7:30 p.m. (Central).
I’d love to make these writing sprints (or at least one a week) a “team” effort with as many of you participating as possible. The more support (and accountability) there is, the more successful we’ll all be! But if those times don’t work for you, go ahead and pick the times that work best for you.
1k1h Tips for Success
- Let anyone within your household know that you need one uninterrupted hour to try to head off at the pass any interruptions.
- Set a timer. This is most important. Don’t do this by just watching the clock. You’ll find yourself only watching the clock and not getting anything written. Setting a timer allows you to forget about the time and concentrate fully on writing.
- Prepare yourself before starting your timer. Re-read the last few pages you wrote (without editing/revising!) to get your head back into the story and figure out where you need to pick up. Review your outline and/or character pages in your Story Bible. And then put all of that away so you don’t use those to procrastinate during the hour.
- If you listen to music while writing (I recommend instrumental so that you don’t get distracted by the lyrics), have it set up and playing before starting your timer. Use earphones, even if you’re working at home, to block out any sounds that might pull you out of your story.
- If you can’t listen to music while writing, I recommend wearing the earphones anyway. People are less likely to interrupt you (at home or working somewhere like a coffee shop) if you have them in/on—and they help block out those distracting sounds.
- Make sure your writing space (both physical and mental) is set up and ready to go before you start your timer.
- In other words, make sure that about five to ten minutes before you start the 1k1h sprint, you’re in the process of getting ready to write.
- Silence or turn off your cell phone (unless you’re using it as your timer—then don’t turn it off). Close your Internet browser. Close Facebook and Twitter (as soon as I give the “start” signal, of course). Close your email program if you use something like Outlook that isn’t web-based. Eliminate all distractions!
Don’t Know How to Start Writing?
If you aren’t sure how to start writing when the hour starts, even after re-reading what you’ve previously written, here are a few suggestions.
- Which character had the viewpoint in the last scene you wrote? Start with a different character in this scene.
- Still not sure what to write? Try this prompt:
Character walked into the room. Character saw a piece of paper tacked to the wall on the other side of the room. Character walked across the room and took the piece of paper down. Character read the piece of paper. The piece of paper said . . . - If that prompt doesn’t work, try the exercise of taking your character to the market to buy food.
- If you can’t think of what the “next” scene is that comes after the one you just left off with in your previous writing session, start writing something you know comes later in the story that you already have a good idea for. Though I recommend writing your story in linear fashion (from beginning to end) instead of jumping around, sometimes you need to write stuff that comes later if you already have a clear idea of the scene in your head, just to make sure you don’t lose it. And that can also help you figure out what comes between what you’ve written so far and that future scene and help you to fill in the gap next time.
Hopefully, I’ll “see” you at 3:30 and 7:30 (Central) this afternoon/evening. If not, don’t forget to check in with your progress and how you do with your own 1k1h sprint(s) today!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 15,000 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 35 — Monday Motivation from Meg Cabot
On Mondays, I’m going to share some writing advice/motivation from authors who may be well known to you, or whom you may never have heard of. Hopefully, you’ll find inspiration or a new way of looking at or thinking about writing from these little clips.
Today, our Monday Motivation comes from bestselling YA novelist (author of The Princess Diaries) Meg Cabot:
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Hope you’re doing well with your writing. Don’t forget to check in with your progress!
For a 75,000-word manuscript, today’s cumulative word-count should be at least 12,500 words.
#FirstDraft60 Day 34 — Sunday Story Reflections
On Sundays, we take a moment to step back and think about our writing from a wider view. In order to do that, I’ll post some guided questions—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.
Because we’re now in the writing portion of the challenge, there will be a much narrower focus to the question(s) posed—and we’re going to turn that focus onto the story itself.
Reflections for Day 34
- What have you learned about your main characters so far?
- Are your characters staying on track, or have you already had to make revision notes in your Story Bible for things that will need to change in the revision process for the second draft?
- Do you still look forward to spending time with your characters every day?
I look forward to seeing your answers and will be posting mine soon. And don’t forget to check in with your word-count progress!
#FirstDraft60 Day 33 — Saturday Review and Catch-Up
Saturdays throughout this challenge are going to be our days to review what we’ve covered during the week, and to catch up on anything we fell behind with. And now that we’re writing, it’s time to catch up with word count if we’ve fallen behind during the previous week, too.
When doing any kind of a challenge like this in which the goals are cumulative, it’s always good to build in a day (or two) to be able to get caught up on anything we’ve fallen behind with. Because most of us work during the week, we have more time to do this on the weekends. So until October 30, be sure to set aside time on your weekend, whether on Saturday or Sunday to stop, update your Story Bible, and get caught up on your word count.
This isn’t permission to slack off during the week. It’s to give you permission to not beat yourself up if you don’t meet your daily word-count goals or if circumstances make it impossible to write on a day you’d planned to. As long as you give it your best effort and the complete it by the end of the week, you’ll be able to stay on track.
So let’s begin.
Assignments for Saturday:
- Review everything you’ve written so far. Remember that we’re draft writing, so don’t spend too much time revising—but making a few corrections or revisions/additions here or there is okay. But it’s better during this process to make notes (in the Revisions section of your Story Bible and/or in comments in your document) of what you’re going to want to change once you finish the first draft and start your rewrites/revisions for your second draft.
- Update your Story Bible and Style Guide based on everything you wrote this week.
- If you’re behind on word count, do some 1k1h sprints this weekend to get caught up (and possibly get ahead).
- Once you’ve caught up and have everything updated, do some “what if” brainstorming and see if you can come up with some additional ideas for either the characters themselves or for your story/plot. Have fun with this. And if you feel inspired to write some more, do it!
- Check in and let us know how you’re doing, what you’ve accomplished, and what you hope to achieve this weekend.
Above all else, have a great weekend!
KayeDacus.com 