A wave of weary regret washes over me every time I think about the website I left behind. WriterInside.com has been around for almost four years now, but I have taken so little care of it lately that it has become stale and malnourished. Unfortunately, my own writing has suffered the same fate. In the midst of life, family, and career, I have let the writer inside me slip into a hole, where he’s been hibernating for close to a year.

Maybe it’s not quite accurate to say he’s been hibernating. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that I kicked him into a well, and he’s been screaming, clawing, and scratching to get out ever since.

Well, this past week, I finally lowered the bucket and helped my inner writer back to the surface. Deep in the darkest corner of the Texas Tech library, I shut myself up in a tiny study carrel, dusted off the old manuscript, reacquainted myself with my characters, and began laying down some words again. My story had been frozen in place for so long that it felt a little awkward moving on to the next scene. The new words didn’t seem to blend with the old, and it took me a while to find my rhythm again. But now that I’ve finally gotten these old, rusty gears a-crankin’ again, I’m beginning to fall in love all over again!

Aryn Ravenoak walked the walls of Alphaeon for the last time under a full moon.

This was the opening line for the novel I started writing on November 5, 2007 for National Novel Writing Month. I started another story on the first of the month, but 6800 words into it, I discovered that it wasn’t worth telling. So on day five, I started from scratch.

For those of you who aren’t aware, National Novel Writing Month is a yearly challenge for writers all over the globe to write 50,000 words of manuscript in 30 days. That amounts to about 1,667 words per day. Participants are encouraged to pound out a manuscript without editing, to leave their “inner editors” behind for one month while they focus on just finishing a first draft.

The good news is that I finished 50,000 words; so, technically, I won NaNoWriMo. But the bad news is that I haven’t finished the manuscript . . . nor do I intend to.

Although I ended up falling in love with my characters, I don’t feel that the story itself is worth telling without some major revisions that I don’t have the energy to make. It would be easier to start from scratch.

My current plan, now that I’ve gained a much greater appreciation for leaving my inner editor in the dust, is to finish up a manuscript that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. I’m already 54,800 words into the manuscript, and the story’s been begging to be told.

I have no choice. I have to tell it.

Hopefully, when you write, you’re trying to make your characters into real, three-dimensional people. If all of your characters talk the same and act the same, then your writing will be stale and boring. Characters are not supposed be filler for your plot. Characters, through their personalities and desires, are supposed to DETERMINE your plot. So here’s an exercise for helping to flesh out your characters a little more.If you have a character who seems to be a little bland, then I want you do to two things. First of all, I want you to sit down with your character and interview him/her. Ask your character what he/she wants most out of life, and then write down the answer. Try to get a feel for your character’s personality. And then–here’s the fun part–find the character trait(s) that you really want to emphasize with that character and then create another character who is the polar opposite of your first character as far as that trait is concerned.For example, if you have a hero who is a little shy and insecure, and if that insecurity is crucial to the development of the plot, then create another character who is confident, who can talk to anyone in any given situation, who feels comfortable around anyone. This second character doesn’t have to be an arrogant jerk (although he could be). He just needs to be confident.When you create a character like this and have him interact with your hero, then your hero’s insecurities (or whatever traits you’re trying to highlight) will naturally be highlighted. Your character will seem more real and more relatable.Give it a shot, and let me know how it turns out!

National Novel Writing Month begins tomorrow, and I still have no idea what I’m going to write about! But it’s all good. I’m not too worried about it. After all, one of my favorite ways to write is just to start with a character and a situation and go from there. There’s something very liberating about letting the story take its own course, not knowing what’s lurking around the corner.Anyways, starting bright and early tomorrow morning, my fingers will be typing away, trying to get at least 1,667 words per day . . . and all of this on top of a full time job and a freelance web design career!

Wish me luck!

Thursday is the first day of November, and you know what that means! It’s almost time for National Novel Writing Month!

I’m excited and a little nervous about the whole shindig: excited for obvious reasons, but nervous because I still have absolutely no idea what I’m going to write about, so I might have to resort to my backup strategy.

My preferred strategy for NaNoWriMo is to have a plan, and possibly an outline for my book before November 1 arrives, but it’s starting to look like that’s not going to happen. So my backup strategy is just to start with a character in a ridiculous situation and go from there, writing without a plan. This strategy can definitely be fun. It’s exciting to have no idea what lies around the next corner. But it also makes me a little nervous.

Either way, I’m really excited about November, even though I won’t have much of a social life for 30 days. Anyways, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo too, drop me a line and keep in touch!

A little frustrated with your sentence structure? Can’t figure out why your writing just doesn’t seem to have the right ring
to it? Often, this is the result of a lack of variety in sentence structure. If you examine the sentence structure of well-published authors, you’ll see that they tend to use a lot of variety, not only in the structure of their sentences, but also in the length of their sentences. Try out this exercise to help you gain a feel for different kinds of sentence structure.

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Find a passage of prose from your favorite author and copy it down onto paper. As you’re doing so, take note of the way the sentences are put together. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to diagram them — although that wouldn’t be a bad exercise.)

After you’ve copied the passage down, I want you to copy it again. But this time, I want you to change all the words while keeping the sentence structure intact. This might be especially useful if you find a passage of similar length from some of your own writing and then rewrite it using the EXACT same sentence structure as the paragraph you’ve just copied. This means it will have almost the exact same number of words, the exact same punctuation, etc. But it will be a completely different story. Here’s an example of a sentence altered in this way:

Original sentence (from Moby Dick): “Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore.”

Exercise sentence: “Now, with rock-bottom interest rates, to invest in the real estate market is as accessible to the novice investor as to participate in an IRA.”

Notice there are some small differences in sentence structure, but the structure of the sentence as a whole remains intact. If you try this technique out with an entire paragraph, you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn!