Thursday, July 23, 2020

Setting New Writing Challenges for Ourselves

One of the things a novel writer can do, especially a discovery writer like me, is to set herself challenges in her writing.  One of the ways in which I’ve done this in the novel I’m now writing, is to tell the story from the antagonist’s POV for a chapter.  This am I did twice as many words as I had the day before.  The challenge would appear to be working.  But I snapped back into the mind of a sympathetic character.  What can I do to switch it back?  It appears now that this chapter will be a battle of minds for control of the chapter.  

The chapter ended with the sympathetic character, a green skinned slave being beamed aboard the ship where he had imparted intel to the ship’s officers, then they dropped a capsule which will kill the Yakutchi and plant Human-friendly life.  So it ended up not being such a big challenge, after all.  But I really recommend setting oneself a challenge and carrying it out, because you never can tell what you’ll discover about your writing and yourself.  I guess this means I am a coward.  

But those are the words which came to me.  How do your words come to you?  I have six muses, but do you suppose I could rouse any of them to help me with this challenge? Noooooo!  The only one who did answer my call last night and this morning came up with this rather squirmy squirrelly approach where my spy gets away with spying, and his old masters get destroyed by an Il’an’ai capsule.  So where does this put the Big Bad?  Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll find out tomorrow.

Set yourself a writing challenge!  Maybe your results will be better than mine.

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