Mischa Fox

I felt nervous this week working on the new draft. There’s a spot around 40 pages where I tend to hit a creative wall, which then makes me panic, which further blocks progress.

I decided to try a version of the suggestions from The 90 Day Novel by Alan Watt. (I’m not sticking closely to the days, more looking for ideas that might work for me.)

The first few chapters discuss setting aside 2 hours a day to write any idea that comes into your head as fast as you can in your book world. It also suggested having conversations between characters that you know will have conflict in the story.

I’ve used the exercise where you “interview” the character when you get stuck, and had great success with it. (Though I had one character in the past who notoriously did not want to answer, and always ended with me writing that he stalked off.)

Having the characters interview each other has been a delight this week! I’m having fun with some very unexpected responses.

I’ve only been doing it about three days now, and I’ve stuck mostly to characters that I know will interact with one another. I’m curious now, what will happen if I have characters I didn’t plan on conversing interview one another! Could open up some new areas to explore!

Already, it’s changing the shape of the story I thought I wanted to tell. I like it better.

I’m also ecstatic that (basing it on the traditional length for my genre and the length of the first installment) I’ve got about 10% of my rough draft already.

Not caring about writing this one in order is working best for this one! SING THE BONES demanded that I write each of the chapters for the main plot in order, and then go back and fill in more.

I’m enjoying getting to learn the quirks of this story.

I’m also tempted to try this exercise–writing interviews and vignettes as fast as I can in 2 hour increments daily–but rotating multiple novel manuscripts. I’m curious how that might work out for me.

It was very tempting to switch it up and try the process with a new book idea that popped out of me this morning… It took all my discipline to simply jot notes on breaks between meetings and stick to my original plan to work on this sequel tonight.

Maybe after grad school wraps up next February I’ll try it. Or on one of my breaks between semesters. Right now, I want to get as much of this one out as possible before summer semester starts and I’m too busy to give it more than a couple of hours a week.

It would be AMAZING if I get the rough draft down by the end of April, and then can let it sit and simmer until August so that I can come back with fresh eyes for the first revision.