I'm not a writer. But I am beginning a novel. I've been reading books on how to write novels as well as looking over some novels. Ironically I'm not an avid novel reader. I've read a few novels in my life, but very few.

I might also add that I'm not truly interested in becoming a writer. The only reason that I'm currently writing a novel is because I have a story to tell. I'm not writing it for the purpose of becoming a writer. However it looks like I will need to become a writer for the purpose of writing the novel.

I'll try to answer your questions within the scope of my current non-experience.

1. Do you ever get writer's block? If so what methods do you know of to eliminate this dilemma.

I haven't yet. Although I have written songs in the past though, and I have gotten writer's blocks with songs. In fact, I'm currently in the middle of writing a song which I haven't figured out completely yet. In fact, I haven't even figure out precisely what I want to say in that song yet. Sometimes I'll be inspired to write a song without knowing where it going. The same thing happens with poetry.

However, I would never start writing a novel if I haven't yet figured out where it's going.

2. Do you write a chapter outline or create character sheets before writing a story? If so what is your methods in doing this? If not then explain why.

My novel is a complete story in my mind. I know precisely what the story is about from beginning to end. For this reason, I was able to write an outline for the story before I began writing chapters, and I found it very helpful to do this.

I first broke the story down into seven parts. Each part being a major turning point in the story.

I then focused on each part, breaking them down into chapters. I gave each chapter a clever title based on the concept the chapter needed to convey. I ended up with approximate 6 chapters per PART.

Having done that, I could see much better what it would take to actually write the story. Each chapter contains significant points that must be made. The whole idea now, behind writing each chapter, is to simply make the points that need to be made in each chapter.

Having done this outline, I could see the whole story from a bird's-eye view. I then realized that Part two and Part three could be combined and told together even more effectively than they could be told separately.

So this reduced the book from 7 parts to 6 parts. And now the whole outline contains 30 chapters. All of which I feel are significant and required.

This doesn't mean that I can't change them. It simply means that I'm very happy with the outline thus far.

I might add also that whilst doing this I realized that instead of killing one of my character halfway through the novel, it would be much better to put her into a coma and have her come back out of the coma later to enhance the ending of the novel and drive home the main plot even better than I had first imagined.

So just creating this outline gave me a wonderful insight on how to make the whole story much better. This also had a backlash of requiring that I create a new character at the very beginning of the book to fulfill this new twist at the end.

So having created this table-of-contents of chapters was extremely helpful, and ended up giving me a great insight to enhance the whole story.

~~~

As I say, I am only just beginning to write, and this is my first novel ever. I started in with Chapter One. I have several points that need to be made in this first chapter. So I have divided that chapters further into scenes. Of course the end-readers will never know about this level of division because it is only for my purposes as the author.

So far I have only written the first scene of the first chapter. The last scene of the first chapter is an extreme drama. I already have it all in my mind. But getting it down on paper takes time.

3. When you write your first draft, do you worry about sentence structures, usage, punctuation, and grammar, or are you more into just getting the story on paper first?

Absolutely. I write like as if I'm writing the finished book. Clearly it won't be. But I still write it as if it is the finished version.

I'm in no rush to jot it all down on paper because I know what the story is. It's not going anywhere. The whole story is in mind, as well as in the chapter outlines. It's not going to fade away. There's no rush to jot it all down.

At least not yet. Maybe as I'm writing I'll find places where I'm on a roll so-to-speak and I'll want to just jot things down without worrying about how they sound to a reader. But for now, I see no reason why I shouldn't write cleanly the first time. Why write sloppy just so I have to go back and rewrite it? I could never see the point to that. Why not just write it correctly the first time?

Even then I glean over it anyway.

In fact, what I find is that as I write sometimes I'll lose my momentum (you might call that a form of writer's block I suppose). I just think of it as losing momentum in the moment.

What I do then, is go back a few paragraphs and re-read them to regain the momentum of the scene. When I do that I will glean the text. If I read a sentence and think to myself, "That didn't flow well", I'll rewrite it on the fly to flow better. This doesn't break my momentum, in fact, I feel that it often gives me even more momentum.

When I do that, and then when I get back to where the momentum had stopped, the next sentence seems obvious. And the smoother the flow, the more obvious the next sentence seems to be. It almost writes itself. It just pops out as the obvious next thing to write.

4. When is the best time of the day to write? Do you take breaks or do you write many hours nonstop?

I write anytime the mood strikes. I write for hours on end. Yet in spite of all that writing I'm only 10 pages into my novel. However those 10 pages have been gleaned over quite a bit as I had to regain momentum many times, and when I go back to regain momentum, I automatically glean things to make them flow better. Maybe that's why I was losing momentum in the first place?

I'm not sure if this writing style will be successful as I'm just starting out. But so far I'm happy with how it's starting out. I also feel that it's important to feel good about the start. I can almost put these ten pages behind me thinking of them as being completely finished, and using them as momentum to move forward.

If I just jotted things down always thinking that I need to go back and rewrite, then I would feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I would feel like I'm not really making progress, because I would know that all of the previous pages are garbage and need to be rewritten.

This way, I feel good about the previous pages as being FINISHED.

That doesn't meant that I can't go back and glean them some more. It just means that I've already cleaned them up considerably and theoretically I could leave them as is if I had to.

I need to feel that I'm leaving a trail of "Finshed Work" behind me. Otherwise I'd feel like I'm just working on an unfinished rough draft and that I'd have to go back and rewrite the whole thing, and I'd lose incentive almost instantly then.

But that's just me. I'm like that with everything I do.

I'm not going to change who I am to become a writer.

I need to see REAL PROGRESS, not just rough drafts.

Hello to all of the brilliant poets and writers. I hope you are having a great Sunday!

Today's Word of The Day: July 6th


Dogmatic [dog·mat·ic] adj. 1. Expressing rigid opinions; Prone to expressing strongly held beliefs and opinions. 2. Asserting opinions in a doctrinaire or arrogant manner; opinionated.

Challenge of the Day:

Write a poem or short story of why your mother was so important to you.