BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing Are you writing your novel this year?

That's what I'm counting on! They do seem to have words and ideas all their own.

Joan

All the best to all of you

Take it step by step, word by word, day by day - you'll get there. And do give it time to mull and ferment in your mind, you'll be amazed at the "life of their own" that your characters develop. They really do take over and write their own story. The trick is keeping your focus.

Sisters in Ink...I like that! Maybe we should think about starting our own little writing group...like the Bella bookclubs, but for writing instead of reading...It might help motivate some of us!

And I can only WISH that my characters would write their own stories for me!

~Karen

I always loved daydreaming and to me writing a story is like that. I keep it going in my mind when I'm not working on it.

I watch old re-runs of Murder She Wrote and in one she said she needed to finish her book because she didn't know which character "did it" yet. Now that's a way to enjoy your writing.

sometimes I think we just need to get our minds out of the way and let it flow through us on the paper. I always think my story is out there somewhere, all completed, I just have to capture it.

Don't know if any of you believe in the Law of Attaction but I am using it to write my book.

I totally agree with you Joan. A lot of my writer friends scoff at me because I don't write an outline prior to writing my novel/stories. It just doesn't work for me! When I was working on my Nation Novel Writing MOnth (NaNoWriMo) story, I was determined to make an outline. So I worked for nearly 3 weeks prior to the start and wouldn't you know it, my main character did a 180 half way through the second chapter. I wanted her to be one way but she evolved into something else. So the outline got thrown out. Now I do make notes as I go along so I can remember insignificant events that can turn intto something else or to remember what was said and done in the chapter I just wrote. But otherwise, I let it just flow out of me.

I don't do outlines either! I write up a synopsis of the story as I see it from the beginning but don't necessarily stick to that. On my recent one, I had an idea of who the "evil one" would be at the beginning but during my hiatus from working on it, I had an entirely different idea that will be the twist at the end and probably make the story!

I wanted to do the NaNoWriMo thing but at the time I had a writing assignment that took up part of every day. even tho I miss the steady paycheck of that, it prompted me to get back to real writing again.

I think writing is like anything people do including sports or whatever. You get into that "zone" and it's the best place to create.

I'm an outline person, but I totally understand the beauty of freewriting.

With my first novel attempt I was working through a writing course and they suggested writing 1-30 down a page and then writing a sentence about the beginning, middle, and end at 1, 15, and 30 respectively, and then filling in the rest. That didn't work well for me - I had huge gaps between about 3 and 15 and before 30, and I just started writing and ended up with a novel of only 40K words!

I eventually scrapped that one and rewrote a slightly different story with far more planning, but a lot of the planning came in the middle of the story. So for my latest book I decided to take what I'd learnt in the past and apply it up front. I've ended up with 32 pages of notes for a trilogy and I have 79 pages of the first book in the trilogy. I can't begin to describe how much easier it has been for me to write this way.

I think everyone has to find their own way to work and having a notebook handy at all times for ideas is essential! The more notes you being with, the more fleshed out your story will be when you write it. I guess you could say, I'm a note-keeper but not an outliner, per se.

I've found I never suffer from writers block because I begin each day going over what I wrote the previous day and it kind of gets me going creatively. the first day I just write freely, kind of whatever comes to me in the way of dialogue and ideas and then the next day I go over it again and add details and fill in a few blanks.

To me the main thing is to keep going and not get bogged down by the need for it to be perfect the first time. I read once someone said "I'm a terrible writer but a GREAT re-rewriter!"

Hi I am new to this writing forum and like what I have read so far.

I too am working on a novel that I have been working on for years.
(Actually, there are three that I have been working on for years...lol)

I am my own worst critic when it comes to writing so I would write for awhile, read it over and throw it away because I didn't like where it was going.

After writing a novel for awhile and then throwing it away, it's hard to get right back to it so I take a break for awhile and attempt it again.

I actually did complete one. It was handwritten...hand printed rather, and was just over 500 pages long. I started to type it then but didn't like it because it sounded weird. It sounded kind of childish, for the lack of a better term.

Any way I decided not to handwrite the rough drafts anymore and just type them because then it is easier to go and change or fix things.

The present novel I am working on now, I have been going steady at for about three months. Usually 2 or 3 pages a day and on a good day I can type eight to ten. Hunt and peck method mind you. I am no where close to being a typist. I have to look at the keys and not the screen but can type pretty fast that way too.

However, I digress...

My present novel has just under 70,000 words and 202 pages that are double spaced. I am pleased the way this novel is going except that I have one problem...

I mix my past tense verbs with present text and it's killing me because I don't know that I am doing it and my wife tells me about it when she reads it. I have had two other people tell me the same thing so I am trying to watch for that and will fix it all in the proof reading stage.

Anyway, I apologize for the long thread and will try to keep future ones shorter.

I guess I'm heading back to the drawing board with my novel. So far, from the romantic fiction editors I've heard its "too literary" a work for their audience; and from the literary editors, "it's too heavily weighted towards women's fiction."

They've all said "It's a great story and we really enjoyed reading it!"

???