quote:Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).
What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them? Describe what you worked on. Set goals for next week. Did you learn something during this week?
Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).
Writing on a novel Characterization World Building Relevant research
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As for me:
Last Week's Goals:
THE SHAMAN'S CURSE/THE VOICE OF PROPHECY/BEYOND THE PROPHECY: Find out more about that group promotion. Not yet.
WAR OF MAGIC: Promote. Some.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Continue writing first draft. Working on it.
posted
I’m not sure yet whether if what I’m currently working on will be a novel, but I think it would be good practice for me to reflect about my writing each week to keep myself accountable.
This week, my main goal has been to write every day. My secondary goal was to finish writing a short story. I’ve met my primary goal of writing every day, but I have not finished a story. However, I feel I have made progress: for once, I have focused my writing efforts into just one story, without getting distracted, and have written the story so far in order. The story hatched from a challenge I accepted last week to write something set in the 4th century A.D. Being more interested in sci-fi than straight historical fiction, I interpreted the challenge quite freely and projected some of the political/ ideological aspects of the late 3rd- to early 4th-century Roman Empire into a future dystopia setting. It’s not my usual choice of milieu, and perhaps because of this novelty, I found the setting interesting and decided to see if I could turn the opening into a full short story.
Although I haven’t finished the story, and it now looks as though it will turn out to be more of a novelette or even novella, I’m pleased with the writing I’ve done this week. Over the last few days I have learnt quite a bit about scene-crafting and world-building, and written a few scenes that (as far as I can tell) worked much better, as complete scenes, than any I’ve produced before.
Something else that I have realised: if I find myself getting stuck while writing, it’s almost certainly because I’m unconsciously growing bored with the narrative. And if it’s boring me, the writer, it will certainly bore any reader. Boredom comes from having no clear idea of where the scene is going. When I realise this, what I need to do is to notice the reason I’m getting bored, stop, and refocus on the scene itself. Now that I think about it, this lack of awareness while writing is probably the main reason my NaNoWriMo novel last year didn’t work, even though I hit the 50,000 word mark and ‘finished’ the story: I got stuck writing certain scenes, but instead of realising that I was bored with them because I didn’t know where they were really going, I forced myself to keep writing those scenes despite the block. The result? Boring scenes, boring plot.
Now my strategy is to stop writing a scene as soon as I realise I’m bored with it and focus instead on moving the story forwards. Turning to a new scene, or jumping to a later part in the same scene, has almost always given me a clearer view of my story’s global plot, setting, and characters. With this new vision of the story, it’s not hard to go back and work past the blocks in a fresh way.
Next week, I hope to continue developing the same story, and by the end of the week I would like to have something approaching a full outline for it. I’ll be caught up with other things for most of the week, so time will be limited, but I hope I’ll be able to continue with world-building and characterisation, at least.
Posts: 76 | Registered: Sep 2016
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posted
I have been very bad about coming to this form lately.
But I am still working on novels. The e-version of Learning CurveX2 is on preorder at Barnes and Noble and a couple of other sites. The paper version is waiting for a new file to be uploaded. Thought I was done but found four nitpicks and redid two sentences while I was fixing those.
I have worked on the revision of The Courier but that is going way slower than I anticipated.
As is the revision of the Journey of Mystery which I have also worked on-a little.
NaNo is coming up and I am thinking on which idea to go with. A rewrite of my very first NaNo novel maybe. I have learned so much about writing since then-maybe five years ago-that a revision probably would take as long as a rewrite. But I have new ideas too.
I forget if I mentioned last time but I worked on "Insane" a little too.
Seems like there was another novel too but I can't think of it right now. If I do I will add a PS.
Posts: 5289 | Registered: Jun 2010
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posted
I've finally started to make progress on my outline by starting with character wants/needs rather than plot arcs (which I kept getting stumped on). I've got the major protagonists and antagonists' wants and needs written out, and am working on a couple more semi-important characters to be safe. My goal is to have a plotline incorporating everything together by next week's thread.
Posts: 745 | Registered: May 2015
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