Things are going all pretty well with the story now. Just a little bit behind track (by only 700 words though) but the weekend is coming up, so there will be time to catch up a little then.

I’m beginning to realise that there is no such thing as having a free month to write! Despite knowing that I would by doing NaNoWriMo again this year, and planning as little as possible for November, it still doesn’t stop issues, events and other time draining activities for coming up and taking away the time that you want to put towards writing. But hopefully this teaches me that:

• If you want to write – and you’re not one of the lucky ones that has the ability to do it as a full-time job – be prepared for distractions.
• Get creative in trying to find time to write. Don’t wait for a solid block of 2 hours or more – write 250 words in that spare 30 minute block you have. It all counts.
• It is possible to find the time to write despite what life throws at you. NaNoWriMo is a commitment to pushing past all the distractions and plans and still get 50,000 words written in a month. Use that commitment through the rest of the year as well.

It’s been a very productive day of writing today. I’m back on track to hit 50,000 words by Nov 30th, but still a few thousand words behind where I would need to be to hit 60,000. I’m going to try and make up a bit more ground this week, but things are stacked against me at the moment: a osteo appointment on Tuesday night, a writing group Wednesday night, and a wedding coming up this weekend. I guess it will just take a bit of extra planning, and maybe trying to squeeze in 500 words wherever i can throughout my day. Might be time to get creative with that.

I’ve spent most of today procrastinating about writing, and doing very little writing at all. In fact, I didn’t write at all on Days 12 & 13, so the advantage I gave myself in the first week or so has now been eaten up. I’m now a little bit behind schedule, but I do have a whole Sunday to catch up again.

For the most part, i’ve just been too tired on Thursday and Friday this week to write. I made the executive decision to sleep instead of write, and I think it was a good idea. So even though I spent most of the morning looking at houses, attending auctions and having lunch out with my beautiful wife, i got home in the afternoon, and was doing all sorts of weird procrastination things. Like trying to fix my iMac that shat itself. But I managed to squeeze out about 1,700 words. So it’s left me with a manageable target for tomorrow.

Yay! I broke the elusive, yet inevitable, 20K word barrier tonight. Only a few thousand more words, and I’m half way there and on the downward hill to the end.

It’s been quite a stressful day today – among other things, putting in an offer on a town house. It’s a scary and stupid game, playing with larger sums of money that I’ll ever have to deal with again. So between numerous phone calls and emails during the day, I got home from work, and after a quick dinner, drove over to check out the area. It almost 9pm by the time we got home from there, and soon another hour was gone, and it was 10pm. I really wanted to make sure I did my quota for today, so now, a few hours later, I’ve broken the 20K mark and can allow myself to go to bed.

Not a huge addition to my word count today: only about 500 words. Still 500 words is better than nothing. It was 10:30pm before I sat down to write, and now at 11pm, I am just feeling way too knackered. The heat is really taking it out of me, and I haven’t consumed my normal volume of caffeine for the day either. My creativity is flagging, so the best thing for that is just a good night’s sleep.

I was surprised that I managed close to 2000 words today. Besides the fact that I got home from work late, took my time, and squeezed in a new episode of Heroes, I expected to write a thousand words at most before going to bed.

That is, complete a single scene. Not a difficult goal for any given day. So far, I’ve been aiming to get a single scene to be about 1,000 words. This particular scene, possibly one of the most important in the book took an interesting – and I hope, touching – direction about half way through, and I decided to let it run through to completion. So by the end of the scene, it was close to 2,000 words. Most likely I will let it stand alone as its own chapter.

It’s great when your subconscious gives you these great ideas that had never occurred to you before sitting down to write.

I feel bad right now – I’ve just completed the first part of my NaNoWriMo novel, and I’ve done something very awful to my main character. I always knew it was coming, and it is necessary for putting the story on it’s true course, but I don’t like it at all.

It’s late Sunday night here, and I’ve just completed a few hours writing after getting back from a weekend in Sydney. I didn’t get time to do any writing yesterday, and even though I felt like I should have, I figured that I deserved a break after a week of solid writing already complete. I’d wanted to write this particular scene on Friday night, but I felt like it needed or deserved some dedicated time rather than just writing it in fits and spurts.

I’m still on track though – or 235 words short of my 2,000 / day word goal for Day 8.

Once again, there seemed to be no end to the distractions tonight. The more I do NaNoWriMo – and writing in general – the more I realise that it’s much better in the long term to learn to write despite distractions, not to avoid them completely.

It was only about 1,200 words tonight, but I’m in a good position for not worrying or stressing over my word count on the weekend. Even if I can squeeze in 1,000 words a day, by Sunday I’ll still be on track for my own goal of 2,000 words a day. Even if I do nothing for the next 2 days, I’ll still be on ahead of schedule of a 1,667 / day word goal. So not bad…

The very next scene for me to right is the First Plot Point – where everything changes! Should be exciting

Managed to add almost 2,000 to my word count today. Didn’t get to writing till about 8:30pm, and wrote till about midnight. I’m finding that writing at the pace of roughly 1,000 / 1.5 hours is comfortable, and doesn’t feel too rushed. It means I’ve gotta find 2.5-3 hours a night to write, which can definitely be difficult at times, but I’m at least happy with the quality of what I’m writing.

Still managed to make a decent addition to my word count for the day. Had some friends over for dinner – we went out to Andy’s YumCha in Essendon after work, and they came back to our place for coffees afterwards. Also chatted to my mum for half an hour – her and Dad are off on a holiday to Western Australia tomorrow.

Finally managed to get to some writing at about 9:30pm – did a normal day’s word count somehow. God bless outlining and knowing what scene I wanted to write!

Productive day in the end, despite a lot of procrastination through most of the morning and afternoon. God bless public holidays for horse races. Melbourne Cup day is always a saving grace at the beginning of NaNoWriMo.

I didn’t quite make my target of 10,000 words, but I came close enough to be happy. It was made more difficult by a sore back – brought on, embarrassingly, by a fit of sneezing. A trip to the osteopath is booked in for the near future, but not near enough. Earliest convenient appointment was Tuesday next week. I’ll have to see how I go between now and then.

For the end of only Day 2 of NaNoWriMo, I’m very happy with the word count I’ve managed to rack up. It’s a few hundred words shy of the ideal Day 4 word count. It certainly helps that yesterday was a Sunday and I took the day off today to make the most of the Melbourne Cup public holiday tomorrow.

But I’ll be away next weekend, so I want a comfortable word count buffer to make sure I don’t fall behind if I can’t get a lot done while I’m in Sydney. Not to mention that for the rest of the week, every evening is booked up with dinners with friends, and house inspections (there was one of those today as well, but that doesn’t matter so much when have the whole day off).

Ideally, I would like to be at 10,000 words by tomorrow. That way, even if I only do 1,000 words per night for the rest of the week, and nothing over the weekend, I’ll still pretty much be on track come next Monday. Maybe I’ll have to come up with some creative ways to squeeze in a few hundred words here and there over the next week.

It all adds up in the end.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. November: the month of novelling insanity. A race against yourself to a 50,000 word novel.

This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo. In the previous years, I felt like I’ve written decent, yet distinctly first-draft novels that have evolved over the course of the month.

This year, I feel better prepared for what lies ahead. Maybe it’s the experience of past years, but for the most part I feel better prepared because I’ve been outlining my story for the past month.

About 2 months ago, I came across the site Storyfix.com. It’s a blog about writing by US author Larry Brooks. For me, it started with a series of posts he wrote on story structure, and more recently an expanded ebook on the subject. He advocates a strong understanding of story structure if you hold any hope of one day being published. Obviously with such a bold statement, he’s got his decriers, but I’m with him on this one. He takes a lot of his story structure queues from the world of screenwriting, but they are just as applicable to novels. It’s all about story, regardless of the format used to deliver it.

Even if your skeptical or a by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer, I recommend reading his posts on Story Structure. You might be surprised what you learn, and even if you prefer to delve into the writing process without an outline, an understanding of conventional story structure will stand you in good stead for making the right decisions about your story as you proceed.

So as NaNoWriMo starts this year, I feel like I’m much more in control of the story I’m telling. I’m not blindly jumping into writing without knowing where the story is going, how it’s going to change and how it’s going to end. I’ve been making decisions about the major plot points of my latest novel for the past month, and slowly, scene by scene, filling in the outline to move the story from one point to the next.

And far from the writing being a tedious afterthought, I’m excited by this story, maybe moreso than my stories from previous years of NaNoWriMo. I get to focus on writing each scene to the best of my ability. I can focus on the emotion and conflict rather than wondering how this is going to get me to the next scene.

And even just in the first day, I feel like writing this way makes the prospect of 1,667 words per day a much more manageable task.

Yep, still a winner. And now just showcasing the other NaNoWriMo winner badge that they give you when you win.

As much as I was writing a few days ago how I was going to power past 50,000 words, now that it’s the end of the month, I’m just exhausted. Now that the pressure’s off, I’ve fallen in a heap and all I want to do is sleep.

I’m mostly happy with what I’ve written in the past 30 days. I felt like the story was going nowhere in the beginning, but the story really started to flow and be interesting (or at least, I think it is – future readers may have a different opinion though!) towards the end. And it’s a first draft, which typically means its inconsistent, confusing, and melodramatic, and I’m sure my story is all of those things, so hopefully in the next few months I can revise it, explore more of the themes of the story, tighten the plot in places, characterise the people of the story more, and create a more vivid setting. Even though the 50,000 words is done, the hard part is still to come.

I’ve still got a few more scenes to write before the end – possibly about 5000-10000 words – and yes, I know I said the same thing last year and never got around to it, but I’m actually going to do it this time!

Hooray! I made it to 50,000 words, and one day ahead of schedule! For all the things that have been going on this month – trips to Sydney, watching Ironman competitions, working on weekends, etc, etc – I’m surprised that I made it there at all.

So I’ve become an official NaNoWriMo winner for 2008. Once you hit 50,000 words, there’s a facility on the NaNoWriMo website to paste in the text content of your novel, and they will do an official verification of your word count. Interestingly, the count the website gives you is slightly higher than what you see in MS Word. At the moment, my official word count on NaNoWriMo is 50,497. It’s nice that it’s a little higher that MS Word, instead of lower.

So is that it? No, most definitely not. I’m heading out to dinner tonight, and maybe I’ll do a little bit more later. But I will definitely do some more tomorrow. I have no intention of trying to beat the 60,000+ I did last year, not at this late stage. But last year, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have all the commitments that I did this year, so I’m still very proud of my effort.

One more day to go, and I’ll see if I can’t do another couple of thousand words before the official end of NaNoWriMo…

I’m now only 3,056 words away from becoming a NaNoWriMo winner for the second year! With any luck, I’ll be there by about this time tomorrow, if not a little sooner.

Having today off to write had been great! I was at my desk and writing by 8:30am, and had a few breaks throughout the day, with Maria coming over at lunchtime for an hour or so before going off to get a haircut. It’s our five year anniversary tomorrow, so we are heading out to dinner tonight. So that’s why I’m not intending on doing any more writing tonight. Close to 3,500 words is pretty good for a single day, and I’m well within reach of making the 50,000 by Sunday night, so I’m taking the night off to have a nice relaxing dinner.

Having the day off today to focus on writing has been fantastic. I could really get used to it. Not only does writing get done, but also it’s a good time to be at home for other reasons as well. I had someone come around this morning to fix the blinds in the living room of my flat that no longer opened and closed properly, and also I could be here for the delivery of the flowers I’d ordered for Maria for our anniversary. A good friend and great writer, Bella – who I started a writing group with a few years back – used to have a day off a week to focus on writing, and I got a bit of a taste for it today.

Hmm, now how do I convince the company I work for that I want this to be a regular thing…

Today saw me do only about 500 words or so. That was partly due to conscious choice, and partly due to the poor decision to go out for a few drinks after work (mostly the second, though!)

Having worked on Saturday last weekend, I arranged to have tomorrow off work, so today felt a bit like a Friday for me anyway. When I get caught up in nights like out like that, in the past I’ve been inclined to stay out fairly late, even if I have to work the next day.

But I actually thought I was being good. I left about 8:30pm, but by the time I got home and had a little bit of dinner, it was 9:30pm, going on 10pm. So I did a little bit of writing. I’m glad I did something at least.

So now, after talking to my partner Maria on the phone for twenty minutes, I am making the executive decision that I would be much more productive tomorrow if I just go to bed and get a good sleep.

I can begin the final 6,401 words of my novel tomorrow…

The end is definitely in sight now, of both NaNoWriMo and my novel. I’m actually quite excited about how the ending is coming together. I’m finding these scenes interesting to write, and hopefully, for the reader, they will be full of suspense and surprises. And if their not, well, it’s only the first draft, and a very planned on at that.

I am looking forward to the end of NaNoWriMo though – mostly for the obvious reason that it will be exciting to have finished another novel in 30 days. But also for the fact that I can get plenty of sleep again. I’ve always been a bit of a night owl, but it’s just felt like every night this month I’ve been up till midnight or later writing. And as fun as writing can be – its great when you experience that loss of time cuz you’re so involved in it! – it can be a mentally draining activity. Especially after you’ve been at work all day working on other mentally draining activities.

And I’ve already got the champagne in the fridge for Sunday when I write those final words!!

I only managed a thousand words today, buy knowing that I’ve got three days at the end of the week to get to 50,000 I’m not that concerned.

What I’m hoping this year is that I will actually finish the story. During nanowrimo last year, I romped thru the end and finished at 60,000 words, but I never completed the story. I was about 5000 maybe from the end on nov 30, and thought ‘I’ll just finish it off in a week or two.’ but I never did. Mainly because I had other writing projects I was focusing on. So there are only about 10 scenes left to write before the story’s end, so this year will actually get there…

Hooray! I made it to 40,000 words! It feels like the beginning of the end from here. It’s like when you are on the highway, and you see the sign that the exit to your destination is 2km away. You’re not there yet, but you know it’s not far off.

Now that I’m back on track with my word count, I feel like I can take off a lot of the pressure I’ve been putting on myself. After having the days of needing to write 2500-3000 words to not fall further behind, writing only 1667 words in a day seems easy… I never thought I’d say that. At the same time as getting back on track, I feel like I’ve had better focus on writing. Tonight is one of the few times that I’ve finished my writing for the day, and it’s not 11:30pm or 12am.

After Saturday – when I wrote out a plan of the scenes that I needed to write before the end of the book – I’ve slowly been ticking those off. I have 15 scenes written down, and I’ve managed to write 6 of those now. And they’re starting to be really fun scenes to write as well, where some of the mysteries surrounding the story are getting revealed to the main character.

Every now and then, I’ll tweak these a little bit – maybe move one scene a little later or drop one scene if it does make sense to have it – but I’m definitely finding having a list of scenes to write that I can then tick off as I complete them very satisfying.

Now that I’m back on track with my word count, there’s temptation to slack off a little. Knowing that I only need to do 1700 words a day and I’ll get to 50,000 words easily is making me a little complacent I think. Or at least a little distracted.

Maria and I went to a friends 30th birthday party for a BBQ today, so i didn’t get a chance to write through most of the day, but then when I did sit down to write, I kept finding my focus being pulled away to other things. I thought that doing 1700 words would be easy, but what should have taken only 1.5 – 2 hours had taken me the most part of the evening. It would certainly be easier if I just get the writing done, then I can get distracted with whatever I like without feeling guilty.

I had an interesting conversation today with a friend, Pete, who is a builder. He was asking how the writing was going, and I was telling him how last night I’d sat down and written out all the scenes I want to write, starting from the very last scene, then working out the scene before it, then the scene before that, etc until I’d reached the point in the story where I currently was. He said that approach was very similar in many ways to building a house. He said that in building, you design from the roof down, but build from the ground up. It makes sense that if you didn’t give any thought to the roof as you were building the rest of the house, you might end up with a structure that couldn’t support the roof’s weight. But once you’d designed with that goal, you had to lay all the foundations and build from the ground up.

I thought that was a really neat analogy for what I’d done with laying at the scenes…

Yes, that’s right! More than 4,000 words written today! I’m so stoked about that! I’m now officially back on track for reaching 50,000. In fact, a little ahead now! I could get to the target by Nov 30th with the daily average of 1,667 words.

But screw that! I’ve come this far, I’ll have to see now if I can get past 50,000!

Ok, so anyone noting the time that I’m writing this – 2:14am – will probably say that I didn’t do all 4,000 in one day … but I haven’t gone to bed yet, so I’m counting it all towards day 22. Not that it really matters anyway.

Probably the most impressive thing about this word count is that I didn’t really start writing until about 4:30pm this afternoon. I worked half the day, didn’t get home till about 3pm, and there was a lot of fart-arsing about and procrastinating before I actually sat down and put finger to keyboard.

And the other thing that I managed to squeeze into that time – around 7pm when I was having dinner, was I sat down and planned out the rest of the scenes that lead up to the end of the book. It seems to flow well, and there’s are a few interesting twists in there that I wasn’t really expecting …. or in some case, wasn’t expecting I could work out how to fit them in.

So already, I’ve completed two of the scenes I planned to do, scratched one because my protagonist decided he didn’t want to do that, and wrote another unexpected one to create a bit of conflict and explore some additional themes of the story … not a bad friggin’ day of writing at all!

It’s been another one of those days where I haven’t found a great deal of time to write. But I did something … about 600 words. It’s good to know that when time is short I can be happy with doing the little that I have time for.

Today – being Friday – was work as normal, but a relatively busy day. Found out that I was going to have to work tomorrow too – at first I wasn’t that happy with that because Saturday and Sunday were going to be my writing days, but I negotiated to get next Friday off if I came in this weekend. So though I’m having to work tomorrow, I can finish NaNoWriMo with 3 straight days off.

The reason that I didn’t get much writing done tonight was because I went along to see the Rocky Horror Show. I’d organised it a few weeks ago with my sister Jenny and my partner Maria. It wasn’t the most fantastic story – it could be confusing and hard to follow at times, not really knowing who certain characters were – but the whole story is framed as schlock science fiction, so you can forgive a few jumps of reasoning here and there. But overall, it just a fun show to watch. The characters were interesting, the songs were lively and the cast just looked like they were having a fantastic time on stage.

I didn’t get home from there until about 10:30pm. I decided that instead of just letting the day go by without doing anything on my story, I’d aim just to do a few hundred words. It only took me about 40 minutes to do 600, so now I can go to bed and be happy that I’ve made some progress…

Writing over the past few days has been going really well. I’ve found the scenes I’ve been writing more interesting than what’s come earlier in the book. The scenes are tighter, tend not to wander along tangents for the sake of bloating the word count (even though that really is the goal this month).

I’ve had a few really interesting ideas so far of how to lead into the ending of the novel. I’ve always had a vague idea of how it was going to end, but it’s one of the fascinating things of writing a first draft: sometimes you write something, it might just be a throw away line of description, but it’ll be something where you just go “Oh, I can make use of that little bit of information later.”

And that’s the thing that can be really fun – when it’s the little details that provide the solution to the hero’s problem right at the climax of the story. It reminds me of “The Fifth Element” – it’s only about a third of the way through the story where Bruce Willis’ character is lights a cigarette and you notice a single match left in the packet. And then it’s that match that provides the solution to opening one of the rocks in the climax. For the reader, it’s a kind of “a ha, that’s what that was about.” Devices like that are always much more fun for the reader than the “Deus Ex Machina” – the God from the machine – that swoops out of nowhere at the last moment to resolve the story’s conflict.

I had a single goal with my writing tonight, and that was to get to 30,000 before I went to bed. And I can sleep well now, but I achieved it! Yay!

It’s great looking at that word count and knowing that there is the distance to go is less than the distance that I’ve come so far! It seems achievable, which can’t be a good thing. Going by the average of 1667 words/day there is to do to get to 50,000 in 30 days, I’m only a day behind now, which should be fairly easy to catch up on the weekend. Though I may have Friday’s count to catch up on as well – I’m heading to see the Rocky Horror Show on Friday night with Maria, my sister and her friend, so writing won’t happen until late in the evening, if at all.

But having NaNoWriMo finish on a weekend this year is fantastic! It means that I can have one last ditch effort to get to 50,000 if I’m lagging. I’m definitely going to be selfish and shut the world away that weekend…

I feel like I’m slowly starting to get back on track with my writing again. It’s been flowing a lot easier for me tonight – and last night as well – than it did for much of last week, so maybe having a bit of time away from it over the weekend wasn’t such a bad thing. Or maybe it’s just that I’m more focused on it, and putting a whole lot more pressure on myself.

I’d really like to be at a point where on Nov 30, I’m writing the final scene of the novel, but somehow I don’t think that will happen. Oh, I’ll have reached 50,000 words, but I think there will need to be more after that. The first 25,000 words have been pretty meandering, but the great thing now is that I think I’ve finally found the middle of the story that will connect the beginning that I wanted with the end that I wanted.

It feels like my writing is getting tighter – in so far as I’m not letting scenes drag on for the sake of increasing the word count – as i realise what i’ve got to cover between where I am and the end of the book. Some of the scenes I’ve written in the last few days have been quite short and to the point. And I’ve made a concerted effort to get a bit of conflict into them as well – that may be lacking from some of the earlier parts of this story.

So overall, i’m feeling pretty good about where I am at the moment with the story. I’ll hit 30,000 words tomorrow night, which will be great, so hopefully I can keep up that momentum.

Woot! I’m finally over half-way!

There’s this feeling you hitting the half-way mark. It’s like the Wednesday of NaNoWriMo – you’ve struggled through the horrors of Monday, the boredom of Tuesday, and now that it’s Wednesday, it’s all downhill to the end of the week.

Writing from 20,000 to 25,000 has been the hardest part of this process for me so far. It didn’t help that I’ve been busy for the weekend, but I don’t think that was the biggest part of the problem – I crossed the 20,000 word mark on Day 12 (last Wednesday) and it’s taken me to today to make up the next 5,000 words. I think a lot of that was psychological. I think I was freaking out a little at the task ahead of me, no matter how much I try to blame it on internet flash games.

But there is something magical about crossing that 25,000 word mark. I can now begin counting down to 50,000. Every word I write from now on one less I have to write (ok, so that was always the case, but I couldn’t think of it that way before).

And the other thing that crossing the half-way has made me realise is that I need to start wrapping up this sucker! At 20,000 words I felt I was struggling for ideas, but now at 25,000 I have to begin working towards the ending, and I have so much ground I need to cover (or brutally summarise). Now it’s a matter of too little space and time for too many ideas.

What a bad problem to have!

Hopefully today was the last day this month where I won’t be able to find the time I need to write. Today was the day of my sister’s Half Ironman in Shepparton, VIC. It’s not her first Half Ironman, and she has completed a full Ironman previously, but this was the first I’d been to.

The day of the spectator at one of these Ironman events is not as easy as you might think sitting on the sidelines is. And if you take into account that at the end of the day, spectators don’t get the endorphin rush that the competitors get, it may just be harder … at least, that’s what my sister says – I intend never to see if from the perspective of the competitor.

The start of the day is not quite as early for the spectator as for the competitors. If you’re keen, you’re there for the beginning of the swim (about 7am). Unless you are right at the start, you probably won’t be able to pick out your spectatee (ie, person you are there to watch … I love making up knew words!!) from all the other bodies thrashing around in the water, even if you know what colour cap they may be wearing. You might get to have a few words with them as they are transitioning onto the bike leg, but then, depending on number of laps being covered, you might only see them twice in the next few hours as they whizz past at 30-40km/h. And you better be quick if you want to get a photo of them. Then again, a few words at transition if your lucky, and they are off for a leisurely 21km run. See them a few more times for a brief 30 seconds and then you wait around for them to finish.

So in the course of 4-7 hours (depending on the spectatee), you may only see them for 5 minutes all up between the start and end of the race. A lot of time to squeeze in a day’s worth of writing, you might think. But no … somehow, the day gets filled up very quickly: chatting to your parents who are also spectating, comparing photos to see who’s are best, and moving from place to place. And then at the end of the day is the 2.5 hr drive back to Melbourne.

Now that I’m back, I’ve written almost 700 words, but I am just sooo tired, and miserable due to a burgeoning sunburn, I’m giving up and going to bed – and it’s only 9:30pm. For anyone that knows me, they’ll know that that never happens…

Once again, the advantage of free time that weekends typically offer to people doing NaNoWriMo has been snatched from my grasping hands once more.

Today saw Maria and I leaving Melbourne at the stupid (for a weekend) hour of 8:30am to drive up to Shepparton. A while back, we’d said to my sister – who is competing in the Half Ironman event on Sunday – that we’d go up to cheer her on. And my folks were coming down from Goulburn (in NSW) for it as well, so it was turning out to be a bit of a family weekend.

I tried to write when I could – I tried for 5 minutes in the car on the way up, but the screen of my laptop was either too glary or impossible to see when I put on sunnies. I managed an hour or so once we got to Shepparton while Maria visited a friend, then after late lunch/early dinner for those in their carbo-loading phase before the big day, I managed another hour or two of writing while Maria went off to visit other friends.

So I did as much as I needed to yesterday to make sure that I’m not slipping any further behind than I already am, but I know that I’ve gotta put in a stellar effort this week to make up the 2000 words I’m behind at the moment. I actually found myself starting to get a bit stressed out by it yesterday … self-inflicted stress mind you, but stress nonetheless. I just wanted to shut myself away from the world so that I would have no distractions.

Hopefully the last 2 weekends in will be less busy. I already know that there’s a birthday party on Sunday for one of Maria’s friends. I’ve tentatively said “No.” (a rarity for me), but I’ll see how I go during the week and decide closer to the date.

OK, so another day of not so good word counts.I’ve got no real excuse tonight, other than just got distracted. But then, it’s a Friday night. Who could be blamed for wanting to relax and let their brain go into neutral on a Friday night?!

So I’ve got the weekend ahead of me, though a weekend away, so I’m a little bit worried about just how much I’ll get done. I’ll have my laptop with me, so hopefully I can crank out a few thousand words, but I’ve still got the rest of the month.

To be on track, I need to be at 25,000 by tomorrow … not sure I’ll get there, but you never know. The further behind I get, the harder it will be to catch up, but there’s still 2 weekends to go in November. If all else fails, the final weekend of the 29th and 30th might be very busy.

Internet flash games are evil!!!11

Somehow tonight, I managed to lose about 3 or 4 hours of good writing time to a few dumb, but incredibly addictive flash games. 10:30pm came around, and I hadn’t written a word yet today. It was one of those moments of personal disappointment in myself that I could have so little self-discipline. But then, everyone needs a bit of a break now and then, don’t they?!

But anyway, fueled by self-disgust, tiredness, and a bit of Dido music, I embarked on an incredibly futile dash to 20,000 words. With so little time remaining in the evening, I certainly put that internal censor to bed early, and somehow, managed to get through 1,600 words in an hour and a half. That feels like a personal record. May not be the greatest moments in literary history that were written tonight, but it was something.

I’m excited that by tomorrow, I’ll have hit 20,000 words! Yes, I know, it still means another 30,000 to go, but I’m going to revel in the small victories as much as I can.

So I managed to put another 2,000 words onto the count today, which I’m happy about.

I’m finding another interesting thing as I’m going through this process. Recently, I guess since the weekend, when I had little time, but rushed out the little bits that I could, I’m starting to question whether what I’m writing is actually quality. Normally I’d be worried that I’m writing something that I’m not 100% happy with, but here’s the strangest thing: it’s actually very, very liberating.

It makes a strange kind of sense. Once I realise that what I’m writing isn’t perfect – that I’m going to have to come back and re-draft and fix up things once the story is finished – it’s like suddenly I’m giving myself permission to continue not being perfect …… (hmm, interesting insight … I know I’m far from perfect, yet I need to give myself permission to be that way … talk about setting yourself up for failure … anyhoo) …… where was I. Oh yeah, so now that I know that the first draft is not going to be a masterpiece in its present form, I can just let myself write these long meandering scenes that seem to have little point and inane dialog.

And that’s really the point isn’t it? Hemingway famously once said “The first draft of anything is shit” … and that’s really the heart of NaNoWriMo. If your first draft is going to be shit, then make it spectacularly shit. Because if you don’t get that first draft out, it’s not going to get any better by sitting in your head for the next ten years.

Close to 2,000 words completed tonight is a fair effort. I’ve been finding the writing pretty slow going of late – I’m still letting my inner censor critique everything as I’m writing, and I can definitely see it slowing me down. So I made a special effort tonight to not be as critical of myself and what I was writing as I normally would be, and I found that the first 1,000 or so words of it flowed out quite quickly … maybe in about an hour of writing rather than the 2 it’s been taking recently for that much.

So i discovered a few things today that might help with my faster, more flowing writing in the future… the first – and this is something that I’ve heard over and over, as has any writer – is to write what you know. So I was writing a bar scene tonight, mostly dialogue, a bit of description, but when you are familiar with a scene or setting that you are writing about, it becomes soooo much easier to write about it fast.

The other thing technique – which I’m hoping in the near future will help boost my word count significantly – is pointless anecdotes. I wrote one of those tonight that went on for a bit over 500 words. I have the feeling I’ll come back in editing at a later stage and delete it, but for now, in the goal of spewing as much on the page in a month as possible, this may be a crutch I fall back on regularly

So I’ve lost now most of the head start on the word count that I developed in the first few days of NaNoWriMo, but as of this moment, I’m still not behind. At 1667 words a day, 15,000 is exactly where I need to be today to be on track.

But knowing that I wouldn’t get much of a chance to write this weekend was precisely the reason for the early sprints that I did. I didn’t get anything done until late in the afternoon and evening today. We’d been out all day catching up with friends in Sydney, and it wasn’t until we got to the airport to wait for our flight back home that I got a chance to pull out the computer and start pounding away at my story.

So I feel like the story is a bit sluggish at the moment. After a solid start in chapters 1 and 2, I kind of feel like chapters 3 and 4 are a little weak. I’m still struggling to work out the guts of the book – if I was to break it into the traditional 3 acts like a play, I think that I’m almost done with Act 1, I have some rough ideas for Act 3 (including the ending), but still have NFI how I’m going to bridge the distance in Act 2. I’ll be setting up a few things in the next few days that hopefully will give me something interesting to write about in Act 2 – there’ll be a high profile murder, an unexpected love interest for my main character – I should be able to find something to work with in there somewhere…

Worst word count increase so far, but with everything else I’ve been doing today, it’s a surprise that I got anything done at all.

Today saw me up early in the morning to catch a flight to Sydney. We were heading up there to surprise a friend who was having 30th birthday drinks but who didn’t think we were coming. We got to Sydney, checked into our hotel, went out an hour later to catch up with another friend, then back to the hotel to get ready to to out to the party.

The day didn’t offer much opportunity to write, so considering that, I was actually very happy with a word count of 800. It was just a few hundred words here and there – sitting at the airport waiting for the plane to board, and while waiting at the hotel before going out – but I think the lesson to learn from this is that I can still be relatively productive if I use the time I have available to me wisely.

My word count was not quite what I would have liked for today, but hell it’s a Friday night. Even though I had a few beers at the end of the day at work, I didn’t go out to the pub like I usually do with the boys. Instead I went home to write and hang out with my partner, Maria.

I had the time during the evening to get a lot done, but I find it distracting to my writing to do it when someone elsenis around. Most of the writing I’ve done in the past has been done in isolation, not when I’m helping my girlfriend print out photos.

But I also know that I’ve given myself a bit of breathing space too … If I only do 1000 words each early over the weekend – at 15,000 words by the end of Sunday, I’m still on track.

Oh, and 13,000 words means I’m just over a quarter of the way there!!

I managed to add 2,000 more words to the word count today, not too bad for a work day. And I finished before midnight! Always a bonus!

I found my writing flowing a lot better today – I had every intention of getting in 500 words at lunchtime, but I got talking to one of the guys I work with for 20 minutes or so, and by the time I grabbed myself a coffee and a seat, I only had about 15 minutes left before I had to be back at work. Still, in a matter of 10 minutes, I managed to punch out the first 300 words of today’s count. There’s something liberating about having such a short space of time to write in. It forces you not to agonise over every word. It’s the same principle that the whole NaNoWriMo event is based…

That said, I find that when I have a block of a few hours of time in the evening to write, I do agonise over certain words and phrases for a lot longer than I should. And I get fixated on a particular detail that I feel I have to research before I can write another word. Tonight, it was rhinoceros leather. I know, random detail, not important…

I’m almost at that point though where I’ve done my dash of preconceived ideas for the novel. I’m hoping that soon the characters will take over and start telling me where the story’s going…

Woot! A fifth of the way there.

And somehow, I managed to fit in 1,600 words in one of busier days I’ve had in a while. Admittedly, those words were completed sometime around 12:15am, which – with work the next day later today – is not ideal, not something I want to be doing everyday.

I managed to give myself a kickstart on it by waking up at 6:30am, and going 300 words before I got up to go to work. Then at lunchtime, I was up and down Swanston St visiting homeloan people at the bank, and picking up keys for the library that we use for our writing group – that was also tonight, from 6-8pm. And somehow in there, I managed to fit in a quick beer for a mate who was leaving for PNG for a few weeks.

So I got home about 8:45pm, had a bit of dinner, but it was probably about 9:30pm before I got into the serious writing. I wish I could race through a 1000 words in 20 minutes like some people can, but even though NaNoWriMo advocates quantity over quality, quality is still something that I find hard to leave at the door. I’ll save that for the final weekend if I’ve gotta pump out 20,000 words in 2 days…

… praying fiercely that won’t happen though!

Ok, so I didn’t make it to the 10,000 words that I was hoping to get to by today. And it’s back to work tomorrow, and trying to fit in 1,667 words around all the other things that I need to get done. But I’ve made a good start at least. I’m a good day ahead of where I need to be with the word count by today, so there’s still a little breathing room.

So I didn’t get a lot done today. I guess my biggest excuse reason was that I was in a bad mood for most of the day. I’ve never been able to use bad moods to fuel my writing – that’s a skill I’d like to have, take all that raw emotion and turn it into beautiful fiction – usually because when I’m in a bad mood, there’s a very specific reason for it, and my mind is too fixated on that to be able to think about story and characters, etc.

But sometimes you’ve just gotta take the time and do what’s necessary to sort these things out. In an attempt to get it off my mind, I vented onto virtual paper for twenty minutes … a thousand words that I wish I could add to my NaNoWriMo count. Oh well…

But once it was sorted and my mind free again, I got down to a bit of writing, did about 800 words without too much trouble while fitting in a few other things as well. Kind of good … I’m already at a point in the story where I’m not exactly sure where it’s going. Feeling like I’m treading water while waiting to get to the next good part. At least over the next few days, I’ll have a bit of downtime – tram trips, that sort of thing – to do a bit of planning for where it is going.

Nothing much special happened today apart from a lot of writing. I kept to my 500 words at time limit and it worked pretty well. It feels like a manageable amount in a single sitting, and about how often I need another cup of tea or coffee.

Another solid day of writing is behind now, so I’m just kicking back having dinner at my girlfriend’s place. She didn’t see a lot of me during NaNoWriMo last year. So while it’s still early days and I’m ahead of the word count game, I’m spending what time I can relaxing and not bearing myself up for being slack!

I’m finding that thinking about writing 2500 words in a day seems like a daunting task. I managed to do it today, but it felt like it took all day. I would have sat down at about 9am this morning to start, but it was broken up with frequent breaks to get another cup of coffee, or to chuck on the tv for half an hour or so.

But later in the afternoon, I decided that I would do it in smaller chunks. I picked 500 words… It seemed like a manageable amount. And I found that worked really well for me. I’d write 500 words, take a break then get back to it again. This would take me about 30 – 60 min, depending on what I was writing at the time.

And as I get into the main flow of NaNoWriMo, doing 1667 words can be broken into 3 sessions a day. That might be 500 words in the morning before work, another 500 at lunch, then finish it off in the evening. Sounds like a good plan…the best I have at the moment, anyway.

I managed to get myself off to a very solid start on NaNoWriMo – or NaNoWrito as it seems to be known in my house – for this year. It took me an hour or so to write my very first word though. I sat down about 11:30am with an espresso and two pieces of vegemite toast and spent the next little while organising the notes and thoughts that I’d jotted down over the last month. It was probably about 1pm before I fired up Microsoft Word, piss-farted about for a little while creating a cool header for the document, then wrote those first two words: “Chapter One” (I love that that counts towards the word count!!)

For someone that finds procrastinating about writing the easiest thing in the world to do, I surprised myself that I was able to sit still for a long enough stretch of time to punch out the first few hundred words. It took about an hour to do 500 words, at which time I thought it was a great time to start bragging to my girlfriend and to make some lunch. I got back into it easily again, and by 5pm, I had written my first 2000 words. And what’s better than that was, I didn’t think those 2000 words were a steaming pile of poo. Now approaching midnight, I did another hour or so of writing to get my word count past 2500 for the first day.

Luckily, the start of NaNoWriMo beginning on a Saturday works in nicely with the Melbourne Cup, a public holiday here in Melbourne on Tuesday. So with a day of annual leave used up for Monday, I have 4 days to get into a solid rhythm with this writing business. My goal (which I’m well on track for at the moment) is to reach 10,000 words by the end of Tuesday. It might take a bit of time, but it’ll be worth it. I’ve got a few weekends away this month – one to Sydney for a friend’s birthday, and another to Shepparton to support my sister do the half-Ironman. So I need to get as many spare words under my belt as I can.

What other month of the year gives you Movember – an excuse to not shave and look like a 70s porn star for 30 days without being ridiculed by your peers… ok, so there’s a lot of ridicule, but as long your peers are joining in the fun, you are not going to be the sole focus of the hilarity.

As if that wasn’t insane enough for you, add a squeeze of NaNoWriMo into the cocktail of insanity. There is one goal – write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

NaNoWriMo is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. It started in 1999, with only 21 participants so I’m really a late comer to the fun – 2007 was my first year. And I’d say I did pretty well. I crossed the 50,000 word mark on November 25, but wasn’t quite finished, so managed to plug on to 60,000 by November 30.

It is a long, tough month, trying to crank out that many words in a somewhat coherent and structured form, all while still holding down my day job. There were numerous social occasions that I bailed on because I needed every minute possible to make sure I stuck to at least my quote of 1,666 words per day. It taught me to write where I could. I’d plan and structure what I was writing on the tram on the way to and from work, and I’d take my laptop into a coffeeshop at lunch times – even just doing 100 words here or there during the day helped add to the total. It was exhausting, but in a thrilling, maniacal laughing sort of way.

You would wonder why I would choose to put myself through all that again. I’m still wondering that too. But there’s something so brilliantly stupid about the idea that I can’t resist. November 2007 was the most productive month of writing I’ve ever experienced. The rest of the year I tend to be a little incredibly slack and undisciplined.

And for those of you that don’t have time or inclination to write a novel, there’s always NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month – where the aim is to write a blog post every day for a month for prizes.

What we want is a big part of human psychology. What we desire, what we want to achieve in life, is part of what makes us individuals. If everyone wanted to the same thing, there would be nothing interesting about meeting other people, and there would be no place for marketers (ok, so this might make the world a better place.) What we want gives a reason to get up in the morning, gives purpose and meaning to the activities we perform between when we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night.

In fiction, asking what a character wants is the first thing that you need to find out about any character you create, even minor ones which might appear only for a page or two. There are numerous insights you can gain into a character by working out what they desire:

• Why do they want this? This gets deep into the motivation of the character, and can be used to tease out backstory and other character traits.
• What do they hope this bring to their lives? When people want something, they usually have some vision of how their lives will be better in the future when they get it. Characters need these same imagined futures as well.
• How will they go about fulfilling this desire? Two people with the same goal may find different approaches to achieving it, depending on their values, morals, standards and many other factors. How the character chooses to fulfill their desire will drive the action of the story.

Depth of character can be drawn out by giving a character multiple desires, especially if these desires clash with each other. This causes internal conflict and can add shades and personality to an otherwise 2-dimensional or stereotyped character. You get to see who a character really is, how she will juggle both desires and try to achieve both.

Most importantly, characters need to fight to achieve their desires – they need to want what they want. This is the one area where fiction needs to be depart from the real world. It will happen a lot that real people will give up on a desire at the first sign of conflict or hardship. Fictional characters cannot do this. It makes them weak, and really, what’s the point in telling their story. There is a place in fiction for weak characters, but it should never be your main characters.

Knowing what the character desires – and how he will fight to achieve his goals – you now have all the information you need to develop conflict in the story. A story where the character gets everything he wants easily is boring. If achieving a goal isn’t a challenge fraught with opposition, competition, dangers, self-doubt and any other road block to success, then it’s attainment is hollow and unsatisfying – for the reader as well as the character. Readers will have a hard time suspending their disbelief if the events conspire to fulfill a character’s desire easily – in most people’s experience, that’s not the way the world works.

Good conflict comes about when one character’s desires clash with those of another.  Maybe they have the same desire – winning a competition, finding the hidden treasure first, winning the heart of the beautiful princess, etc, etc – but only one of them can have it. Conflict can also be found where characters want different things that are at odds with each other – for instance, one partner wants to stay in the relationship, the other wants out.

If a character’s only desire is stop another character from achieving their goals, the conflict here could easily come across as fake or melodramatic. Unless you are trying to create an entirely malicious or evil character, stay clear of this approach. People aren’t usually like this, so unless you are deliberately trying to write a psycho- or sociopathic antagonist, try to give characters opposing desires, not the desire to oppose.

Many writers just starting out are told that they need to make the reader empathise with the protagonist, but this can be a tricky business to do consciously. For me, my writing to date has been mostly about plot and story without a lot of conscious choices regarding characters. Some characters have happened to be empathetic, others not as much as they could or should have been. So I’m in a position now where I’m trying to consciously learn this skill.

If empathy is an intellectual understanding of the way someone is thinking and feeling – to be able to step into someone else’s proverbial shoes – your job as a writer is not to make the reader think and feel the way a character does, but to make the reader understand why.

The first step you must take as a writer you want any hope of creating empathy in the reader is to empathise with the character yourself.I has this experience recently of coming to relate to one of my own characters. This character is the villian, the baddie, the antagonist. To me, he’d always been a manipulative SOB, the puppetmaster making everyone dance on his strings. His primary motivation was to have control of everything. He was very two-dimensional, not a solid character at all.

But I’d been exploring his past because it was very important to the progression of the story and found that an action I’d always thought motivated by the desire to manipulate another person had in fact been done to keep a promise. All of a sudden, I could relate to him and even see that deep down, he was actually a decent person. This makes for a very interesting villain, the sort I’d want to read about myself.

So what was the change here? Why did looking at it this way change my view of the character? I believe it is because I found a positive intention behind the action. The character wants to keep his promise – a value that I can relate to. I can now see myself taking that same action in the same circumstances.

Maybe this is the trick to creating empathy: find the positive intention, the relatable quality of any motivation. This can be applied to almost any motivation – even a villain’s – and by delving into these actions we can get to the humanity beneath it.

And in the end, isn’t that what all good fiction is about…

“Once More With Feeling” was one of my favourite episodes from 7 seasons of Buffy – yes, I even bought the soundtrack and often crank it up and sing along when doing “stunningly boring chores” like the dishes. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I was excited when I heard Joss was doing another musical.

How the show came into existence is almost as interesting as the show itself. In the midst of the writer’s strike earlier in 2008, Joss got together with a few collaborators to prove that creating content for Internet distribution was a viable alternative to writing for traditional tv.

In my opinion, the experiment was a success. Dr Horrible is not the sort of show you would expect to see on tv, and definitely not one tv execs would gamble on. Firstly because it’s a musical, but also because of the episode format: 3 acts of about 15 minutes each.

One of the reasons I love Whedon’s work is because he is first and foremost a storyteller. There are no expensive special effects here, just a really tight story.

The plot is very straightforward: Dr Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) is a wanna-be villian who is trying to impress Bad Horse and get into the Evil League of Evil. Thwarting his plans at every turn is his nemesis, Captain Hammer (the brilliantly arrogant Nathan Fillion). Caught in the middle of their struggle is Penny (Felicia Day of The Guild fame), who Dr Horrible is secretly in love with.

In anyone else’s hands, this could be a bland superhero show (recent seasons of Smallville anyone??). But what makes Whedon’s work so great is how he is able to reverse cliches and create something unexpected. In this world, the villain is shy and awkward, and hero is the arrogant and self-absorbed ladies man.

The story is driven by Dr Horrible – he has two desires: get into the Evil League of Evil, and to be with Penny. But this is Whedon at his best, and there’s no lack of complications along the way. And in the end, Dr Horrible achieves one goal at the expense of the other. How Whedon squeezed so much emotion into the final seconds is testiment to both his storytelling abilty and Harris’ acting talent.

The songs are so damn catchy that I challenge you watch it a second time without joining in. After all, the title clearly encourages it!

Rating: 9/10

But when a friend suggested going to see it, I thought it could be OK – and it was a tight-ass Tuesday anyway, so it’s not like I had to pay full price. And when I walked out of the cinema 2 hours later, some of my faith in comedy movies had been restored.

The story was pretty straightforward. A war movie set in Vietnam is behind schedule because of the male-diva stars. So the director decides that to get a real performance out of the actors, he’d drop them in the middle of the jungle and capture their emotions with hidden cameras. But things immediately go wrong and the actors soon find themselves in enemy territory and real danger. The plot doesn’t get any more complicated than that. Ben Stiller’s character Tugg Speedman eventually gets captured and the other actors attempt to rescue him.

This movie isn’t going to make you walk from the cinema with a different perspective on life. And despite being made during the middle-east conflict, there’s not even any deep messages about the futility of war or the value of human life.

What Tropic Thunder offers is some of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a long long time. If good comedy is about delivering the unexpected, then many comedy movies fail for being far too predictable or clichéd. Looking at the plot as a whole, there’s nothing especially unpredictable about it. You know that all of the actors are bound to make it out alive.

But there are a handful of scenes that are just so unexpected and brilliant that you’ll laugh like a little kid. The scene when the director drops them off in the middle of the jungle is classic. Another favourite is when Speedman is attacked in the jungle in the middle of the night. Though I’d love to go on about these scenes, I don’t think that it’s worth risking spoiling them for someone who hasn’t seen the movie.

Stiller, Black and Downey Jr each bring their own style of comedy to the movie, and somehow it all manages to blend together well. I’ve haven’t seen Downey Jr in a comedy like this before, and even though he’s playing the “serious” actor beside Stiller’s blockbuster action star and Black’s Eddie Murphy-style comedy star, he has some of the funniest lines in the movie.

If you like a good laugh, get along to see it.

Rating: 8/10

This friend is actually the brother of another good friend of mine. We’d met in London during the year I lived there, and we’d hit it off immediately – we were both writers. He’d been writing for longer than I have, and more consistently too no doubt – breaks between writing for me are often measured in years. He’s delved further into the publishing industry than I ever have, rewritten one of his novels countless times, so as far as I’m concerned, this is someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to fiction writing.

I thought I’d share some of the advice he gave me – you never know who else might find it interesting:

1. Understand how you write – my writing style is not something I give a lot of thought. I just tend to write stuff, and if it comes together with decent grammar, I’m satisfied. Maybe I do have a style of my own, but it’s just unconscious and I don’t recognise it. But as is often the case, once I started thinking about this, I realised that my style is very … proper. My grammar is often probably too good. One of the things that I always find myself doing is correctly those red squiggly underlines that MS Word uses to make you feel bad about yourself. Anyone Most people can create a grammatically correct sentence. But the more I learn about it, a writer’s style can often come from how they break the rules, not how perfectly they follow them.
2. Avoid cardboard-cutout characters – my friend did qualify this point by saying that my characters were pretty developed in this regard, but I know that this is the weakest part of my own writing. This has come from my own analysis of what I write, as well as from other peer feedback and professional appraisals. I think that my faults in this area result from:
   1. Not knowing enough about the characters – I tend to balk at delving too deeply into a character’s past and/or psychology. It’s not hard – you can make up whatever you want about them. But without this, you end up…
   2. Not knowing enough about their motivations – Writing a character’s past will give you clues about how they will behave in the context of your story. It will give you hints about what drives them, what’s important to them, what will make them laugh, cry, shout, etc. And if you don’t know any of that, you can’t help…
   3. Creating stereotyped or similar characters – I started reading a book last year where the two main characters spoke in the same cynical tones and told the same jokes. I didn’t make it through the book, it annoyed me that much. But my own writing suffers in the same way. I’ve never mastered how to make each character’s dialog sound different, and characters of the same gender share very similar behaviours at times. Someone told me once that all my female characters tend to cry at the slightest provocation.
3. Know why each chapter is there – the advice was pretty much this: justify the existence of each and every chapter – and hell, every scene for that matter. He suggested asking two questions:
   1. Why is this chapter here?
   2. What do I want from this chapter?

   To answer these questions, as a writer you’ve really got to think about why you wrote the scene in the first place. We writers often get attached to particular scenes – maybe they were fun to write, or we used lots of flowery language that we think sounds great – but a writer should always be prepared to delete a scene if it’s not serving a purpose for the story.The second question is a gem. I’d never thought to think what I – as the writer – wanted from a chapter. This uncovers a lot of bad reasons for the chapter being there. If it’s there merely so you can have one character tell another character what the reader needs to know – ie. exposition – then you have a serious problem, and you seriously need to rethink the first question. But you answer that you want the chapter to reveal a mystery, characterise your hero, or even just be a damn entertaining interlude, then at least you know consciously what you purpose is when writing the chapter, and this will surely show.

I have a few different people in my life who provide this for me: my girlfriend (yes, I let my partner read my work – I know many who wouldn’t), my writing group and other various friends. My experience is that other writers and people that read a lot give the best feedback. Particularly with other writers, they constantly have the same concerns on their mind as you: structure, characterisation, plot, imagery, etc. They are more likely to be able to point out what you’ve done right or wrong than other readers. They might tell you “The character lacks motivation in the first chapter” rather than a more vague “I just couldn’t get into it.”

Joining a writing group is one of the best things I’ve done for my writing. If you meet regularly – we meet about once a month – you can workshop short stories and improve them quickly. If you are working on a longer piece, it takes much longer to turn around changes, and for the group to read them too, but this is invaluable for getting varied feedback from people with (potentially) different reading interests. And everyone has skills and areas of study outside of writing – we had a doctor in our group who picked up many flaws regarding injuries that occurred in my first novel.

If you don’t have any friends that are writers, I highly recommend making some. It’s really not that hard to do. Many cities have writers’ centres, and they often maintain contact details of writing groups you could join. Or go to a writing course – the writing group I’m in came about by through meeting a few writers at a short story course. We were all interested in meeting regularly to discuss writing, and it just came together from there.

You’ve got to be prepared to give the kind of feedback you would want for yourself – this often means spending time reading other people’s work. I’ve found that you’ll easily see the same problems in other’s work that is plaguing your own writing, but you’re too close to it to see. It will make a better reader of your own work by teaching you to read with a critical eye.