What I do need to know are at least a few of the main conflicts in the plot. The conflicts drive the plot; therefore, we can draw our premise from knowing a few key conflicts we’re centering the plot around.

The key ingredients that I look for in a fully formed breakout premise are (1) plausibility, (2) inherent conflict, (3) originality and (4) gut emotional appeal.

(p. 40)

Whether it’s too many coincidences happening at just the right time to make things work out well for the main characters or a deus ex machina element—something/someone swooping in at the last moment to solve the unsolvable crisis—what you’ve just experienced is a lack or loss of plausibility. If a writer needs to resort to coincidences and/or deus ex machina machinations in order to get through to the end of the story, it’s likely the premise wasn’t a strong one to begin with.

According to Maass, not only do we need to make sure our premises are realistic—“…most readers, me included, need to feel that the story we are being presented has some basis in reality” (40)—we also don’t want them to be so realistic, so ordinary, that they become predictable. One of the reasons we turn to fiction for entertainment is to escape from normal everyday life. We don’t want that in our fiction. We want something to catch our attention by triggering our imaginations and leading us to try to imagine where a story is going. We want to explore “what if…?”

We don’t want a story premise that makes readers say,
“Yeah, I saw that coming.”
We want a story premise that makes readers say,
“Wow! I wish I’d written that!”

It’s so tempting, especially for beginning writers, to shy away from conflict, to not want to put our beloved characters in difficult situations. But if you never get beyond that, if you never learn how to torture your characters, you’ll never be more than just a wannabe writer.

When you’re testing your premise to see if it’s worth committing months, perhaps even years, to developing, you need to know if it creates enough opportunities for conflict to actually sustain the length of story you intend to write. This is why I said that premise is more complex than just having a story idea.

The next question to ask yourself is this: Does the world of my story have conflict built into it? Opposing forces, both strong, perhaps both in the right? If the milieu of the story is not only multifaceted but also involves opposing factions or points of view, then you have a basis for strong, difficult-to-resolve conflict. To put it another way, if problems already exist in your “place,” that is a good thing.

(Maass, 41)

And then once that’s established, it’s our job to point out how our story is unique, how it’s not like all of those already-published books. This is where I think newbies attending writing conferences for the first time get really confused, because this is a somewhat oxymoronic situation: tell us how your novel is just like everything else we publish, but different. The nuance of it, what usually gets lost, is that publishers want to know that they can market a book the same way they market everything else they publish—but that readers are going to want to read it because it has an original and unique slant to it that no one else has ever done before.

If a premise has gut emotional appeal, the novel will start to write itself in my mind. The very idea invites me to imagine characters, complications and dramatic climaxes. It gets me. It feels personal. That, I believe, is because it touches emotions that are deep, real and common to us all.

(Maass,pp. 47–48)

Maass, Donald. Writing the Breakout Novel: Insider Advice for Taking Your Fiction to the Next Level. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001. Print.

2. What priority does writing take in your life?

3. What would you be willing to give up, for just 30 days, in order to have more time to write?

4. What are some obligations and commitments you currently have that you can reprioritize and/or reschedule in order to build more writing time into your daily schedule and give your writing the priority in October?

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 for the next five or six weeks, be sure to set aside time on your weekend, whether on Saturday or Sunday to stop, review what you’ve accomplished throughout the previous week, and then caught up on anything you didn’t have time to finish or even start.

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 get an assignment done or a goal accomplished on the day it’s assigned. 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.

Assignment 2(a): Using the draft-writing technique explained in the above-linked post, write a scene of at least 500 words in which one of your viewpoint characters goes to the market for groceries.

Assignment 2: Determine how you will track your word-count progress and share your plan in the comments.

Assignment 2: If don’t already have a wall calendar, print one out and hang it up. Make sure the calendar is hanging somewhere everyone in the house can see it. Write your writing schedule for every day in October on the calendar.

1. Review everything you’ve done so far and catch-up with anything you couldn’t get to or couldn’t finish during the week.
2. Update your Story Bible and Style Guide based on everything you came up with this week.
3. Once you’ve caught up and have everything updated, do some “what if” brainstorming with your character information and backstories 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 scenes, do it!
4. Check in and let us know how you’re doing, what you’ve accomplished, and what you hope to achieve this weekend.

According to the Bible, one day God got a picture in His mind of a creature made in His own image. This sparked His creativity, so He constructed something that resembled that image out of mud. But it just stood there. Lifeless. Dumb. Blind. Deaf. Incapable of movement. Until God breathed life—inspired—into it.

Inspiration is not thinking about a final product. Inspiration is what leads us to write in the first place: the joy we take in imagination and creativity. When we are in the creative process and inspiration hits, everything else falls away. We lose track of time; we’re deaf to anything going on around us; nothing fills us with more joy than creating a story from our imagination.

Remember the verse in Ecclesiastes that says, “A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart”? Well, here are our “three strands” as writers:

Imagination = Idea
Creativity = Words
Inspiration = Story

Think of your story inspiration as your physical appetite. You can have a craving for a certain kind of food, a certain meal. Thinking about that food builds up your appetite for it. Then, once that happens, you can’t help but think of that food over and over and over until you finally get to the point at which . . .

• You distract yourself by doing something else.
• You go raid the fridge and eat everything in the house because nothing is satisfying.
• You actually do something about it and make (or go buy) that food.

Over the past couple of years, while I haven’t been actively writing, there have been many, many evenings in which I start feeling restless. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing or something I’ve forgotten to do. It’s a craving for story. So I binge watch something on Netflix. Or I read. Or I eat. Or I knit. Or I listen to an audiobook. You know what I didn’t do? Yep, you guessed right. No matter how strongly that feeling hit. No matter how many times during those couple of years that I had ideas that I thought might make good characters or plots for a new story. The one thing I didn’t do was actually sit down and do the work.

And where are those story ideas now?

Gone.

It’s taken me a couple of years to heal, mentally and emotionally, from having to force myself to write a couple of books that I didn’t feel inspired by, that I didn’t want to write, and that I was writing solely for the income. Going through that ruined, for a while, my ability to not just feel inspired by a story idea, but to be motivated to actually put the work into creating that story.

Back to our analogy. Appetite (inspiration) doesn’t actually do anything constructive for you. In fact, if left untended and unaddressed for long enough, it will become a craving. And cravings, unless addressed appropriately, can lead to destructive behaviors. (Take it from a chronic overeater—I’m an expert in this!)

But if we learn how to cook. If we’re willing to go into the kitchen and spend time finding and cooking new and unique recipes, we’re letting that appetite push us to create, to make something, to have something to show for our efforts.

Now, while cooking results in a product that is fleeting, when we turn this back around to talk about writing, when we let our appetite (inspiration) spur us into creating and then writing the story, we have something tangible at the end—a completed manuscript. And, maybe someday, a published book.

If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. . . .

Servant is another unpopular word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you’re not fit for anything better or higher. . . .

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work. Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer. . . .

Someone wrote, “The principal part of faith is patience,” and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not, otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it.

(L’Engle, pp. 23–24, emphasis mine)

Don’t take this lightly. If you’re really serious about this, you need to sit down with your calendar (and if you’re scheduling around a spouse/partner and/or kids, every calendar in the house) and really look at what you have coming up October 1–30.

To paraphrase Master Yoda: Guess not. Know, or know not. There is no guess.

Look at the word-count goals that you determined yesterday (overall and daily average). Think about how long it takes you to write 1,000 words. Have you ever timed yourself? If you never have and you don’t know how productive you can be in a certain amount of time, then you need to allow more time than you think you’ll need.

Don’t short-change yourself.

Assignment 2: If don’t already have a wall calendar, print one out and hang it up. Make sure the calendar is hanging somewhere everyone in the house can see it. Write your writing schedule for every day in October on the calendar.

FirstDraft60 Calendar Template (PDF)
FirstDraft60 Calendar Template (Excel)

Novella: 20,000 to 25,000 words

Novelette/Category Romance: 40,000 to 65,000 words

Single Title/Mass Market/Trade Fiction: 75,000–120,000 words

Epic: 125,000+ words

My published novels fall between approximately 82,000 (An Honest Heart) to 109,000 (The Art of Romance) words—and a total published word count of 1,076,443 words! But a first draft isn’t a final draft, and if I stay true to the Draft Writing method, there will be lots of details missing and scenes that need to be fleshed out if not added in the revision process.

So my goal is to write a 75,000-word first draft (if I end up with enough story for a full Trade Fiction novel and not a novelette—so far, all of my story ideas have fallen squarely in the Trade Fiction category, because that’s how I’m accustomed to structuring a story—and because I signed contracts to write books that long).

In addition to graphing your progress, StoryToolz will show you a spreadsheet of your progress (click History) and a summary of your project and progress (click About).

And, as you can see in both the cropped image on this page and in the larger, extended edition when you click through to the full image, you can have more than one progress meter going at a time. It’s very easy to pull the HTML code and add it to your website (as I’ve done). I believe there are also other options for how you can share your progress meters through other social media sites.

StoryToolz isn’t the only online tracker—they’re easy enough to find with a basic Internet search. Of course, if something like StoryToolz isn’t for you, you can always go “old skool” and track it privately in a spreadsheet on your computer.

We typically schedule our “writing time” as the time in which we plan to be actually writing. But what about all the other time that goes into creating a manuscript? The planning (what we’ve been doing all along), the study of craft, the naming/casting of characters, the research, the plotting, the brainstorming (both along or with trusted writing friends). All of that is important Writing-related activity. And when you’re first getting started writing, it’s just as important to keep track of all of the time you spend working on developing your story as you do actually writing it.

For me, when I feel like I need to track time in order to prove to myself that I am being productive (or to see where I’m spending too much time/wasting time), I use an old-fashioned week-at-a-glance desk calendar. This can also be done in a Google or Outlook calendar on the computer or a calendar app on your phone.

If you’re using a contemporary setting, this means sending them to the grocery store. Try to be as true to your character as you can. Would they make a list and stick to it? Is it just a quick run to the store to pick up a few items needed for a recipe for a special meal? How do they approach their shopping experience? Are they harried? Do they enjoy shopping? Do they compare brands/products or just pick up the name brands they’re familiar with? And so on.

When I was under contract, I was really bad about not keeping to a daily word-count goal and letting that deadline creep closer and closer and closer—until I was mere weeks (or days) from deadline with tens of thousands of words left to write to complete the story. I never thought I’d be pulling all-nighters well into my late thirties and early forties, but there were several while I was in the throes of getting those manuscripts completed to turn in by deadline. And you know what? During those panic-filled, marathon-length writing sessions, I wrote some of my favorite scenes in those books. Because when I have thirty thousand words to write in just a couple of weeks, panic and adrenaline allow the the right side of my brain to take over and shut down any self-doubt or criticism that comes from that left-side inner editor/critic.

The more we learn about craft, the harder it gets to write. That’s because learning about craft strengthens the left side of the brain. And that’s a good thing. Really, it is—except for when you’re trying to get your first draft finished.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m talking about this now, in the middle of doing our prep work for our story.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means.

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

The left side of the brain is the self-analyst, the self-critic, the self-doubter, the little voice that says you’re not good enough, not talented enough, and that you’ll never be able to write the story the way you see it in your head. This is the side you want in charge after you finish the first draft when it’s time to edit and revise. This side isn’t very helpful when it comes to writing the first draft.

The right side is the creative side. The side that wants to make believe and play and laugh and spin around the room until we’re dizzy. This is the side of the brain we need to tap into when writing that first draft. We don’t need to analyze. We just need to tell a story. In writing.

In the creative act we can experience the same freedom we know in dreams. This happens as I write a story. I am bound by neither time nor space. I know those distant galaxies to which Meg Murray went with Charles Wallace and Calvin. But this freedom comes only when, as in a dream, I do not feel that I have to dictate and control what happens. I dream, sometimes, that I am in a beautiful white city I have never seen in real life, but I believe in it. When we are writing . . . we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

Imagination gives us the ability to distance ourselves from oppression or stress. Over the past twenty years, multiple studies have been conducted on the efficacy of creative writing as therapy (the emphasis being on creative). Results have shown that college students’ test scores increased an average of about one letter-grade; blood pressure and heart rate can decrease; it can improve immune function and reduce the rate of minor illnesses such as colds and flu; it can reduce psychological distress over a traumatic experience by reducing “intrusive” thoughts about the event; and so on.

—

Assignment: What are some other activities you can add to the “Creative” column that will help you in preparing to write your story? What are some other “Analytical” activities you are doing that are hindering you from being able to have fun and be imaginative in creating your characters and brainstorming ideas for your story?

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1980. Print.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1994. Print.

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 for the next six weeks, be sure to set aside time on your weekend, whether on Saturday or Sunday to stop, review what you’ve accomplished throughout the previous week, and then caught up on anything you didn’t have time to finish or even start.

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 get an assignment done or a goal accomplished on the day it’s assigned. 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.

1. Review everything you’ve done so far and catch-up with anything you couldn’t get to or couldn’t finish during the week.
2. Update your Story Bible and Style Guide based on everything you came up with this week.
3. Once you’ve caught up and have everything updated, do some “what if” brainstorming with your character information and backstories 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 scenes, do it!
4. Check in and let us know how you’re doing, what you’ve accomplished, and what you hope to achieve this weekend.