First Draft in 30 Days

A lot more useful than it looks...

So, while I was doing NaNoWriMo, I looked into the lovely world of books about writing to get my creative juices flowing. I learned several things. First, most of those books are useless unless you know what kind of advise you're looking for. Second, most of those books are very generic unless they're by unique or cool authors like Stephen King or Ray Bradbury. I also learned that most of those books are written by editors rather than fiction writers who have more of an idea of what editors and publishers want to see than the way people write. I also learned not to pick books about writing out because they look good on the library website because they're probably completely useless. Okay, so I mostly learned that books on writing were useless. I'll admit it.

Everyone has their own writing style. Each writing style is different. Learning that Stephen King tries to write 10,000 words a day does not make me want to write 10,000 words a day. For one, I have a day job. Stephen King's day job is being an author. You can tell because most of his main characters are authors too since he writes what he knows. I don't want to be that person or that writer. So, I'll keep my day job and be Hanorah. Stephen King does pretty well being himself already. I don't keep lists of words that evoke powerful emotional responses from me in my pocket like Ray Bradbury did either. Instead, ideas just hit me and I have to write them down really fast before I think they're stupid.

So... I know how to generate ideas. I don't usually have a writer's block problem unless I have a bunch of ideas vying for attention at once. My problem is mostly... organization. It's hard keeping everything in my head straight. My stories have weak conclusions which wouldn't be a problem if I could keep the intended endings straight. So... I need to be more organized.

Luckily, I found this nice book by author Karen S. Weisner to help me with that problem. It's called First Draft in 30 Days and it totally fools anyone who looks at it. This book doesn't tell you how to write your first draft. Instead it shows you how to organize your novel into an outline in 30 days so that when you go to write your first draft, it may be your final draft because the first draft was the outline. 

I like it because it's actually a pretty interesting way of outlining I had never considered before. In fact, I'm trying the outlining method for my current project currently called the ever-so-original "December Project". If that works, then I'll outline all the books I've finished and start outlining any story idea I've had. If it doesn't work, well it was a fun experiment and I'll have to find a different way to organize things.

Definitely won't be using flash cards, that's for sure!