I am a writer and at the moment I am writing a novel, not my first, but I expect the current one is more likely to actually have some chance of being a publishable book. The first novel began as a NANOWRIMO project, where I wrote the first draft of at least 50,000 words on one month. I can’t remember if I wrote it in November, but know it was just one month, whichever month it was.
NANOWRIMO refers to National Novel(or November) Written in a Month, if you are interested in this, google it and you will find much more information, I am only an interested onlooker really. But certainly writing 50,000 words in one month, if you can dedicate your time to it, is a fine way to get a novel on the way, and ready for action!
So that’s one way. But the way I am currently working on my next big novel project is happening in a different way. I am writing a novel in a particular genre (Cosy Murder Mystery), and I am using prompts given at my writing group, to get some of the novel written. I have setting and characters, and with one third of the novel written so far, I have a fair idea on what is going on, and needs to go on in this first novel in my “At Talloola” Cosy Murder Mystery series.
These prompts are given to writing group members at each of our weekly meetings, for both a writing exercise at the meeting, and also another one for homework. So that is potentially two pieces of my novel written every week, based on those prompts received on the Thursday. This method has certainly been useful to me, and I hope it will go on being so.
But as I am not finished yet, and have been working on the novel for quite sometime, it may be getting close to another novel writing motivating method, and that is a writer lock in session, where I and other members of my writing group choose a particular writing project we’re working on, and spend a whole day at our usual venue, just writing. I may even have written some of this particular novel at one of these lock in, but I suspect not. Because of Covid, we haven’t been able to have a lock in at our chosen venue …
And of course, I also just sit down at home in my chosen writing place, and write. This has how most of this current novel has been written, but going back and finding previously given writing prompts can help me to get more of the novel moving too. Writing prompts are just random things, and the mind, or my mind for sure, takes the prompts to all kinds of places. And when we read our responses written, it is always incredible how far we all go in different directions, based on the same prompts.
We’re all writing in different genres, some prose, some poetry, and we enjoy hearing where other members have taken on the prompt …
Carolyn Cordon - Creative 