[DIANNE] Weeks 5-6: Spinning Your Novel Down the Page

There are two ways that The Weekend Novelist suggests doing the "writing down the page" exercise.

Image and Action is one—you write down an image, then a related action.

Action: Nico takes his seat in the office.

Image: Tattoos peeking out from beneath dress clothes.

The other is Ripping Down the Page—you simply tell the story, but without worrying about punctuation or sentence structure. There's no editor here. Line breaks come in the middle of the page, to keep the focus on the story rather than 'how to write'.

Nico is a Cinderella boy, burnt out on saving lives, wants to

help people some other way. Lives with his mother, good

woman, but he needs a home of his own. Nanny job seems like

the answer, at least for now.

Anah has already tested the Image and Action method and has decided it is Not For Her, as sometimes happens. I think it might work well for evoking images for specific scenes, but in my experience, I need more of a whole-story approach to get me through.

Now that Google Docs supports editing via iPhone/iPod Touch, we've started writing our next novel in a Google Doc. We discovered that we can write simultaneously—and we like it.

...and then we realized it would be perfect for this exercise.

I figured out how to record my screen, so next week, you'll actually get to watch us do the exercise.