I keep telling myself that as I frantically prepare for NaNoWriMo, which is suddenly only a week away. I am nowhere close to having a tale to tell, so any bit of help is a blessing. I'm not talking about maid service or a private chef, though both would be nice. I just need something to help me focus and simplify what seems like a huge challenge this year.
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| Available on Amazon |
To that end, I was enormously pleased to dig into a gorgeous and tightly written eBook called The 30-Day Novel by Merrie Destefano.
It's a short book, hitting all the usual highlights of planning a novel, but in a brisk and concise way. Under 100 pages, some of which are clever MidJourney AI steampunk images and pages for notes, the book covers these topics:
Chapter One: Make A Commitment
Chapter Two: Make A Plan
Chapter Three: Plotting Versus Discovery
Chapter Four: Story Building
Chapter Five: Character Building.
Chapter Six: World Building
Chapter Seven: Make A Schedule
A quick, conversational read and focused enough to get me into a planning frame-of-mind, it includes exercises with prompts that will help you ideate your characters and their stories, as well as clever ideas to develop the personalities and their world.
At $3.49 for the Kindle copy, it's also a steal!
As well, the author has another writing book that is free to download right now.
Sign up for her newsletter here.
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| Dani Greer is founding member of the Blood-Red Pencil. She spends her days drinking coffee, writing, and herding trolls. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter. |
Testing to see if the comments function works now.
ReplyDeleteI must confess I've never done NaNo, for a number of reasons. I found Book-in-a-Week hard enough, LOL. I will need to build up my writing stamina again -- after I've launched my course ':-)
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to digging into Merrie's Writing Tips, though. Thanks for the link :-)
Thanks for the intro to Merrie and her books, Dani. I've never done NaNo. November is just not a good month for me to try writing a novel in 30 days. If it was January, I'd consider it as that is a slow month in terms of family and holidays and all that.
ReplyDeleteNovember's not really a good month for us down here in Australia, either, as the weather is usually beginning to get nicer and we make the most of that sweet spot between cold and wet winter (in Melbourne) and bushfire season. But this year winter has lingered dreadfully and it's still cold and wet! If I wasn't launching a course, I might have considered bunking down to write an entire novel before December.
DeleteReally looking forward to digging into this book and improving my writing skills
ReplyDeleteReally excited to reading this book to help me with my writing skills
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