Great Ideas
Hello. I’ve been catching up with some of my internet travel spots and have found what I think are two great ideas for writing.
The first was something I didn’t find, but rather someone at Sara’s writing group Brand New Aspiring Writers. You can read this yourself on the site, but basically, “Word count journal is … where you write one word your first day, two words your second day … etc. By the end of a non-leap year you’ll have written a total of 66,795 words…”
I think this is a great idea and a great way to really hit that New Year’s resolution of writing a novel. If I can get my head in the right place as far as organization, I’ll be doing it, too. I’ve already signed up for the email notification. You just put in an email address for notification, so it might be a nice little surprise email for the writer in your life. 
The other idea I found was via Sara’s Blog and this post. Basically, A. Writer has created a fake blog in the persona of her character. It’s an interesting idea and could make for an interesting exercise IF you don’t let it get out of hand.
I think this is a great exercise, but I can also see it becoming a huge time waster. My advice is that if you are going to do this - which I encourage if you’re having trouble “getting into” your characters - then first, make it a “group blog” for all of your trouble characters. Let them interact with each other as well as writing about their world. Second, do it only as long as you absolutely need. Your overall goal is to get a novel/story written, not write a blog.
Unless you’re like me and blogging is your job so you’d like to get both done.
Enjoy both ideas and let me know how they turn out for you. 
December 30th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Hello
Great advice as usual. I’m going to give that word count journal a try. Anything that gets more words down on the page is a great thing in my book.
Happy New Year!
December 30th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Thank you very much and happy new year to you, too! Let’s hope we can get a lot of writers on the word count journal.