The man can tell it like it is. While the word choice may be…colorful at times, Chuck Wendig, an über-successful author, has put together an absurdly helpful and spot-on 25-point checklist of how to prepare to write a novel. With National Novel Writing Month just around the corner, it’s quite timely as well. If you’ve ever considered writing a novel (and who hasn’t?), sit down for ten minutes with a cop o’ joe, a notepad, and pencil, and READ IT.
Some great nuggets:
• Are you excited? Does the prospect of writing this thing both geek you out and scare you in equal measure? It should. If you don’t, this might not be the story you want to write.
• Don’t go in totally blind. You don’t need to map every beat, but even three hastily-scrawled phrases on a bar napkin (“narwhale rebellion, yellow fever, Mitt Romney’s shiny grease-slick forehead”) will be better than nothing.
• Write every day, sure, duh. But more importantly: figure out how much you’re going to write on each of those “every days.”
And in my opinion the best one, saved for #25:
• Stop Doing All This Other Stuff And Write Already
But seriously – go READ IT.
Doing NaNoWriMo? Have a writing-on-a-schedule tip? Hit me up below…
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I agree, it is a great article!! I was actually glad to see the “Does the prospect of writing this thing both geek you out and scare you in equal measure?” point, because the storyline I am planning, while exciting, terrifies me.
lol – I wrote a blog post partly on nano today then I started reading other peoples’ blogs and discovered 2 more posts on nano. Meet you all online in November!