Morning all,
It’s 730am on the 7th of October and today I want to walk through my simple plan with you to get back into writing.
When I say ‘writing’ I mean ‘writing-writing’ – i.e novels.
Not ‘self-help literature’ as such (which I want to write as well) – but storytelling.
There’s something magical about storytelling that has been passed down the ages and is something I see as a little bit of my Everest.
So what I’ve already (historically) been able to do – is put together the first draft of a novel in ‘The Death of Richard Finkford’.
What I’ve struggled to do – is to go through the editing.
I’ve thought about it multiple times and even begun to attempt it – but with no luck.
I decided just the other day that I would continue working with my writing coach – Chris Sowers – and have kindly asked him if he could edit the novel.
He has happily said yes – and with that, it’ll mean he can solve the ‘challenge’ of the edit and work his way through it.
This would be a massive burden off my shoulders and will mean I can head heavily into writing another novel myself.
The plan then is as follows:
- Finish reading ‘Save the Cat! Writes a novel’ – this will provide me with the bones of a storytelling framework
- Based upon this book determine the plan for the next novel – and plan it out
- Once I’m reading – begin writing 1-2k words per day 5-6 days per week with a view to finishing draft 1 within 60 days
- Potentially I will ‘write one day/edit the next’ and follow this format – I’m not sure
In some respects, I guess the plan is relatively straightforward in principle.
I know along the way, however, there will be an absolute multitude of challenges I will encounter that I’ll need to overcome.
Many of them as of yet remain unknown to me – but I’m determined to move forward with this – and to begin this journey this week.
Here’s the book I finally finished reading this morning:
There were some awesome takeaways from this novel that I plan to incorporate when I start writing this new ‘novel’ that’s inside of me.
Having finished this I am also excited to reread:
I was checking my audible and I noticed I’d already listened to 4 or 5 hours of this instructional guide – but it was so dense with insights that I didn’t get through much more.
Looking at how this book is able to identify patterns in basically all literature – I want to see what happens when I try and apply this framework to another new novel I’ll write.
The whole concept of getting back onto this path excites me.
Writing (as you can tell) is a huge love of mine.
A day that goes by without writing is not a proper day for me.
It’s a place to reveal my thoughts about everything to the world and use it as a forum to clear my thoughts.
But as I’ve said in the past about writing a novel and here I will say it again – I feel like I have words inside of me.
That there are stories untold that I must pen and write and I would feel remiss if I didn’t do my best to put them together.
So then – here’s what I would like to do (literally next) with this in mind:
- Writing this blog post is a little bit of a ‘call to action for me
- I’ll then tell 3-5 people that I’m going to write a novel and it’ll be done before Jan 1st (the first draft that is)
- I’m going to have a marathon audible session somehow and get that audible listened to by next Friday so I have all the knowledge I need to make this happen.
- I’m going to record a podcast about this tomorrow in more detail so I can cement it in my mind
And then that’s it!
Let’s see where we go from here guys 🙂
