As a writer, I am woefully rusty. I'm getting back in the habit of reading, but I rarely make time to write. So my primary goal for this round of ROW-80 is to just write more! But since each goal needs to be measurable...
« Write every day. It doesn't matter if it's a blog post, journal entry, letter to my baby, or book review; if I (finally) respond to emails, work on my novel or a new writing project... anything goes, just so long as I write something every day. Any. Thing. At. All. At least five minutes worth.
When it comes to "my novel" there are a lot of things to work on. Unfortunately, I need to go back and re-work some of the basics. Specifically, I need to « identify themes and sketch out the plot. (How did the plot get so lost? Too much time writing without direction -- writing for the sake of writing. It muddied up the purpose of the story.) I also need to « put the whole thing back in outline format so I can fix the opening chapters. Since I like to make bulleted lists...
- What's the story? Am I just telling a story or is there a theme/purpose/plot?
- Revert story into outline format
- Figure out the order of events in the first few weeks
- Organize all of the outlined elements (i.e. the whole story)
- Figure out how/where it ends
- If there's time and inspiration, start the re-write of the first few weeks. (Turn the freshly outlined events into prose.)
Thus my goal, by the end of 80 days, is to have a complete outline of my novel, including themes and plot development, major conflicts, minor conflicts, and conflict resolutions.
(Side note: it feels weird to think of myself as having written a novel, but the unfinished tale has a word count of 65k, so I need to stop being shy about it. I'm writing a novel. That's a good thing.)
Reading over these goals, it doesn't sound like much. But for me, they will be seriously challenging. I'm looking forward to the inspiration and support of all the other ROWers!
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