Another day of writing completed; how exciting!
Today it was much easier for me to enter into a writing mode. I didn’t stare at a blank page on my screen for as long as I did yesterday. The difference between today and yesterday is that today I remembered a trick that I occasionally used in the past when feeling stuck. It’s an exercise that helps me whenever I don’t really know where the story is going next, which is exactly how I felt today.
The thing that I do in these situations is that I get a sheet of paper, and on it I write down a few direct questions about my novel or the MC. The questions usually are usually pretty plain and simple. A few examples are, “What is an important event that will happen to my MC in her current stage of life?” or, “What will my MC do after this stage is over?” or even, “What is my MC’s plan or goal for doing a specific action?”
Today’s question was, “What will my MC do after she arrives in the city she is currently traveling to?”
I am aware that these questions are really basic and may be very obvious for someone who is writing a novel. But for some reason, writing them down longhand on a sheet of paper does something to my brain, and it generally makes it easier for me to figure out the answers to them. It’s interesting to note that this trick only works if I do it longhand. I’ve tried doing it in a Scrivener document in the past, but that really doesn’t work for me. I don’t know why that is. I think maybe it’s because, when I write on my laptop, I feel like the words are more final, or as if what I write actually needs to be good, while when I write longhand on a sheet of paper, I can scratch words out, and I can be messy. I think that maybe this allows my brain to dig into my creative side which is allowed to be adventureous and to get things wrong sometimes, rather than my perfectionist side.
Honestly, I don’t really know why it works, but it does, and I can only hope that it keeps working for me.
After doing this exercise and eventually having a few answers (or even just one answer) that I am happy with, I transcribe everything to my Scrivener document. When I am done with transcribing, I am usually in a writing flow, so I simply continue on riding the wave for as far as it takes me. Today it took me all the way to 1026 words, which I am pretty happy with, especially considering that this morning I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to write.
Honestly, for me, any day that I am writing and that I am moving my novel along, is a win!