New members of HTRYN are settling in to complete the Week One worksheets. The lesson guides the student to define the novel he set out to write and to discover the novel he did write. This is hard, surprising, rewarding work that lays out the first road markers for the revision to come.
Log in to share advice and kudos with the students now engaged in creating their revision targets.
I am so happy right now I can barely think. My rough draft is done. I haven’t finished a rough draft of something book length it about ten years, so this is a big thing for me!
A few questions though:
Are we supposed to hate our endings as soon as we read through them? Is this normal?
How long should I wait before taking HTRYN?
What should I do to take my mind off of my WIP?
What if my book sucks?
Yeah, I have more questions, but these are the ones I can’t stop thinking of. I think the reason I haven’t finished stuff before is for this very reason. I am terrified of writing crap.
Any advice you all can offer would be great.
Offer advice, and sing a verse of Atta Girl!
Writing is rewriting, quoth the sage. How, exactly, do writing and revising share one writing brain? Should all the writing be done before the revising begins? One successful author revises as she writes, even going back to the beginning to change elements as new ideas come to her. Some writers can work this way. For others, this striving for daily perfection produces nothing more useful than a trunk full of novels that end on page 47.
Log in to read the discussion and offer your insights into process.
Many of the students at HTRYN are revising the novels we wrote during National Novel Writing Month 2009.
NaNoWriMo happens every November. This is July. The cliffhanger for many of us is: Will the NaNovel from 2009 be revised in time for us to do this crazy thing all over again in November 2010?
Log in to join the goal-setting, progress-reporting, and gentle cross-nudging as the pioneers of HTRYN clear their decks for the next big writing challenge.
You have read, or dug through, quite a few tomes of non-fiction covering all manner of topics. That’s a lot of books–never mind the periodicals and special materials.
If you own these research items, you can use sticky notes, high lighters, rubber bands, to mark and collect them.
But what if your research materials belong to the library?
How do you organize all that info? Keep track of the books you’ve read? Hmm?
Bring your best organizational game and join the brainstorm.
A Sideways student asked her classmates to name their ideal mentors–aside from Holly–who would offer tips on writing as well as on the business, political, and emotional aspects of the writing life.
Surprising answers as well as related questions arose. Log in to learn what others say and then share your own thoughts on the topic.
He wrote a big novel, but the overall message of the story came out all wrong. HTRYN to the rescue!
. . . after going through Holly’s process, I knew . . . I had too many characters and too many unrelated stories. I realized that when I split my original story into its two halves, that I hadn’t split it correctly.
I decided to go into the Monastery and write out the outline of the story from scratch. I decided to keep only the basic events of the story. Basically ONE event, the event that I loved about this story. Nothing else was sacred.
And there was a massive implosion.
Huzzah! to the writer–and to those who read and take instruction from this post.
Some battles must be fought on a story-by-story basis. Selecting the POV or combination of POVs that reveals the finest detail but also illuminates the most sweeping theme, for instance, is one of those battles.
Here students discuss their approaches to this particular element of storytelling. Notice how each student expresses his opinion in first person singular. Does that have a hidden meaning?
So the story came dressed as a fantasy. Cool. Sideways students know that stories are stories, and can’t be bound into just one genre or sub-genre.
That fantasy could be a science fiction story. That cozy could be a horror story.
What?
True. Just log in to take a voyage on the Amazon River.
Come on. No poison darts allowed.