Novel exercises

In working on my novel, I'm realizing that one working style is not going to carry me through the whole process. I started out able to write scenes in the order I imagined them appearing in the book. I got through the first few chapters doing that. Then, I got completely blocked. The idea of tackling the next chapter scared me because I didn't know enough about what was going to happen there.

So I stopped writing for a week or so. Then my husband asked me to read an exercise he was working on for a class he's taking on writing the mystery novel. The exercise entailed writing one scene, about a time when the main character felt his or her life changing very quickly. I read B's scene and was totally inspired. Not only was his scene good, it reminded me that I don't have to write a chapter at a time. I can write scene by scene. One scene! That's all I have to do to keep going.

And that is what I have been doing. Imagining one scene that I believe will occur in the book, thinking about it over the course of a day or two, and then writing it out on paper. I'm saving each as an individual Word file, organized into folders around the theme of the scenes or whose in them, such as "mother", "father", "break up", etc. That way, when I go to plug them into chapters, I can find the pieces that belong in each.

B is doing the same thing, and he's looking for more exercises to give him ideas about the kinds of scenes to write. So what do you think? What ideas to you have for exercises in scene writing?

Writing exercises

I'm not writing. I just don't have the energy, the drive, the desire. I've even been questioning whether I should write at all. I'm thinking about how much easier life would be if I gave up this dream and found a way to be content with my (fairly successful) work life.

But I know I'll get out of this place eventually and remember why I love writing. In the meantime, I'm going to commit to doing some writing exercises. Instead of focusing on any goal-oriented project like, say, "finish a short story", I'm just going to take writing prompts and go with them. No goal. No nothing. Just write.

I think it's a step in the right (write) direction.

A writing exercise: seeing

So my plan to get up early enough to do a writing exercise, do my morning pages, meditate, and walk Chloe is off to a rocky start. Today I only managed to walk Chloe and do morning pages. But as "punishment" for myself, I am promising to fit those four things in at some other time of the day if I don't get to them in the morning (save for walking Chloe, which definitely has to be done in the morning!).

So, here's an exercise, courtesy of Room to Write by Bonni Goldberg. The instructions were to see an item using your imagination, intuition, and instinct, and then to comment on which type of seeing was hardest for you.

This morning I wore my old, out-of-date-prescription glasses to the dog park. So, as another dog and owner entered the park, I couldn't see them well. All I saw was a golden blob and a person layered in a ski jacket. This might have been Chloe's friend Barley, or it might have been a potentially mean dog I didn't know. Chloe was off leash, and she wasn't listening to my calls for her to come.

My intuition told me to let her go. She usually only doesn't listen to me around dogs she knows and loves. But my imagination saw all sorts of possibilities, a dog fight being the most prominent. And what exactly is a person supposed to do if her dog gets involved in a fight? It seems awfully dangerous to try to grab your dog with all those teeth bared and adrenaline flowing. So then the image of my hand getting bitten off by my own friendly dog ran through my imagination.

I can't remember what my instinct saw. Maybe it saw that getting in the middle of a (imaginary) dog fight is a bad idea, no matter how much you'd like to save one of the pooches.

But, in any case, as I heard the voice of the other dog owner, I didn't need to see clearly to know that it was, indeed, Barly and his mom.