If you do the entire exercises, at the end of 60 days you will have the basic worldbuilding information to support writing your novel AND a novel outline in 20 sections. I suggest doing the exercises with writing partners.
Please feel free to use the exercises, with attribution if you post them online somewhere. Also, please let me know how they can be improved.
Mike
Your goodness, hard work and genuine benevolence are astonishing.
We will forward your name to the pope when you're gone.
The Catholic Encyclopedia will one day read:
quote:
Saint Mike: patron of scribblers, cat cursers and despoilers of carpet.
[This message has been edited by Andrew_McGown (edited September 17, 2009).]
My own recommendation is to start doing the world building first. Then when you need more plotting for the world building part, start the novel outlining exercoses and sort of interleave them as you go with most of the outlining occurring after the world building is done.
Mike's novel outlining exercise is a variation of the snowflake method and I found it very useful.
I did my own version of NaNoWriMo in July with the outlining exercise and wrote 53K in two weeks because of the pre-work. (I had my world building done ahead of time.) If you have intentions to participate in NaNoWriMo, I'd get cracking on these two exercises.
The world building exercise resulted in the creation of another novel idea that needs more of the outlining part (although some of that has been done during the worldbuilding part). That was well worth the effort.
I'd also try and work with a few people participating along with you. The feedback from doing it over at Liberty Hall in the forums was invaluable.
It's well worth it. Mike did a great job.
[This message has been edited by Owasm (edited September 17, 2009).]
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[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited September 18, 2009).]
I'm planning on doing NaNo and this is going to help a lot.
Thanks.
The outlining IS an extrapolation of Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake method. I made sure let him know what I was doing ahead of time so that he could object if he thought my interpretation was too derivative. He didn't have any objections.
Wouldn't hurt though, if you're unfamiliar with his methods, to go take a look: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php
The worldbuilding exercise is my own what I thunk up all by myself, which is why it isn't as good as the outlining, but worldbuilding is a LARGE task, and doing it in 30 days is tough.
Comments?
As far as the critiquing levels, I thought the more detailed critiquing challenged my work, which was very good at the formative stages. So I would still request as thoughtful a critique as the critiquer has time to give. General thoughts are still great, but other people's comments can lead the writer to down paths they wouldn't consider on their own. It did that for me.
I can't emphasize enough the group aspect of the project. I would recommend at least three, but even if a writer has a spouse or friend comment on their work at each stage it would make the output better. The group comments really helped the process and, kept me at it.
For NaNoWriMo, a writer who has gone through the exercises, could just concentrate on writing.
[This message has been edited by Owasm (edited September 19, 2009).]
This only takes a hour to watch, then, depending on the person, a few hours or a few days to come up with everything needed to start a novel.
It's worth checking out.