write a novel

I’m a college student and right now I’m in a creative writitng class. We have 3 opportunities over the course of the term to submit writing to the rest of the class for workshop. I’ve used my workshops to test out the first 3 chapters of the novel I’m working on, and I’ve gotten really great feedback! My classmates and prof. enjoy reading it, and my prof. thinks it has a lot of potential to be a very appealing YA novel. This encouragement is so lovely, especially since this is a concept I’ve been working on for over two years now (!). It’s nice to hear that there’s a potential audience for this thing I’ve been slaving away over.

Since NaNoWriMo, I’ve been slightly obsessed with the website www.750words.com . The site encourages you to write at least 750 words every day (go figure!) by providing badges for your profile on the site as incentives.

3 weeks ago I was on a 60-day streak on the site. Then my life got turned on its head and I missed a day. And another. And I haven’t written anything on my novel, which previously I had been so diligently plugging away at, since then.

This is not good.

It doesn’t help that I’m in a creative writing class this term. Whereas for the first 1/2 of the term we were writing poetry and I could balance working in the 2 different genres, we are now focusing on fiction and the short story in class, and my professor said I can’t workshop excerpts from my novel/I need to write only original stuff for him. So. You can imagine I’m having difficulty finding time for both works.

I’d really like to get focused on this goal again—I do believe that there’s a limited window in which I need to crank out this draft, otherwise this will never get finished. And I need to finish something.

That is all.

Applied to and wrote samples for this summer writing program; didn’t get in. I didn’t think of being like Stephen King, who stuck all his rejection letters on a nail in his wall, until after I had deleted the email. Oh well. At least I produced a few pieces out of the deadline.
Right now, looks like there won’t be any novelling until next National Novel Writing Month in November. Kind of sad the way that since I started doing NaNo, I’ve stopped writing the rest of the year.

No, not giving up on the goal. But maybe the novel I had been working on? I still like some of the content, but I’m thinking I either need to take a break from it or completely start something new and come back later. Right now, I’m pretty sure it’ll be the latter. I have a few ideas for a different novel, but I’m being silly about starting it: I think maybe I should just start writing and see what happens, but I also think maybe I should plan, because I don’t want to restart the novel forty times like my previous one.

Sigh. The dramas of writing, right?

It’s always nice when you get this good idea, and you end up thinking about it constantly so you naturally HAVE to write it all down. Well, I came up with a new sort of outlook for my main character, and I started rewriting the opening scenes of Part 1 of my novel. The thing I have to do right now is keep myself from rewriting the whole beginning, which I have done too often: I need to move on, get through a whole rough draft, THEN go back. My goal for this summer is to finish Part 2 of the novel: I’m not sure this is going to happen, but it was nice to feel that gusto when I actually enjoy writing. Sure it faded, but it was there.

So I’ve been procrastinating outlining the next few chapters of my novel ever since I finished writing the last scene I had planned. Last night I finally sat down and started outlining, and it was a whole lot easier than I thought it would be. I’m also trying to keep myself in check as far as what needs to be in the novel and what doesn’t: before, I wrote every little thing that happened during my MC’s day, but I really just need to do the stuff that’s relevant.

Hopefully I’ll get some more done tonight, if I don’t continue to procrastinate online. ;-)

I was looking forward to getting a lot of writing done now that I’m on vacation for a week from school, but as luck would have it, the first night of my vacation, the charger for our laptop died, and the laptop is where all my writing is. Nothing got lost, but it’s been maybe five days, so I’ve been writing in my huge five-subject notebook. I did manage to get almost two chapters done in that time, but now I have to type them all up. Oh well. =/

I’ve had two snow days in a row, so I’ve done at least a thousand words each day. I’ve made awesome progress in the last week, and right now I’m working a bit on outlining a couple more chapters. Fun stuff! =D

I just finished a scene I’ve been working on, and now I can move along with this chapter. I hope to get the next scene done tonight as well, as it’s a short one. Also, reading good books inspires me to write, so more reading! =D

I wrote a chapter of my novel today, plus planned a ton of stuff and, would you belive it; figured out how it’s going to end! It makes me so happy. =D