90 Days to Your Novel has an approach unlike what I've done in the past. The author is a proponent of outlining stories and taking a month to do it! I am not a huge fan of outlining, but I am at the part where she gives you a choice of outline templates and explains them. I haven't finished that section yet, so I'm not sure which one I will choose. I am certain it will not be the roman numeral, blah, blah, blah outline we learned in school! I hated doing those. It was like dissecting a worm in Biology, tedious and useless to me! It may work great for some people, but my brain just doesn't work that way. For my Advanced Comp papers I "outlined" using different colored post-it notes. It worked for me!
One thing I like is that there is a contract in the front of the book for you to fill out and sign. It's just a contract with yourself, but why shouldn't that be just as important as any other contract? Maybe even more so! I have decided to give myself until Labor Day weekend to start. By then I should have all the time in the world on my hands.
[email protected]. Happy writing!
Prompt from The Writer: Instead of sharing a poem today, I'm going to turn the tables and give any reader out there a writing prompt and challenge you to write something, anything, from it! Please, share your writings with me! Yo can copy and paste into the comments or email them to me. My email is Forget to remember Write a story, poem or essay inspired by “forgetting.” A character forgets a key piece of information or an important object before an event. How does this affect him? How does the act of forgetting change the outcome of her story?
Published: January 17, 2014