A popular saying chides that everyone has a novel somewhere inside. These exercises challenge you to take hold of that notion, to unleash that novel, by helping you to establish both a daily writing practice and develop the characters and content needed to bring that novel to life.
What is your story? What adventure/romance/mystery/epic have you always wanted to capture on the page and share with others? Have you listened to advice on writing that says to be any good you have to write every day? Do you wonder how you will ever find the words?
This series of writing prompts is designed to do three things:
A.) Get your seat in the chair.
B.) Turn your characters into people you can taste, touch, feel, hear, and smell.
C.) Inspire you to keep writing and set goals for your practice.
These exercises are not telling you to just write this or do this, but instead they provide you with a scenario and some direction. Some of the prompts are quite literal; others are figurative, but all seek to have you look at the novel inside of you in a new way.
Even if the writing you do for these exercises doesn’t make its way into the finished product of your novel, the knowledge you gain from drafting your characters in detail will engage your prose in new and dynamic ways and perhaps prompt new stories for you to tell and provide new directions for your writing to travel in.
By far and away, the biggest tool this book offers is to help you set a practice of writing. They say if you do anything for thirty days in a row, a habit forms. Imagine writing everyday for a year. With interesting prompts that stretch your creative process, you and your writing will be rewarded for your daily efforts in many ways.