This week I’ve been participating in my friend Laura’s #OneDayMay Instagram challenge, posting a photo each day that goes with a prompt. It’s been a lot of fun. Here was my post from yesterday (you can find me at @shawnsmucker on Instagram if you want to follow along):
Here are a few more things for your weekend:
Only ten days left to sign up for our Six Month Memoir Course. I know some of you have asked about the time involved. Can you fit this course into your life? Well, the first four or five weeks we focus on freewriting a minimum of 15 minutes per day. After that, you should be able to write your daily words in 30 - 60 minutes. Feel free to check out this page to find out more or reply to this email with any questions! We’d love for you to join us!
When Katy's fiance called off their engagement a week before the wedding, she was thrown into a tailspin. But in the ensuing weeks, months, and years, she discovered a strength in herself she didn't know was there. So she decided to write a memoir about it. Today Katy tells us how she decided what to include in her story, how the process went, and how she managed to get her first draft written.
Why is it so much easier to be unkind when you can't see the person? Herein, I think, lies the answer: when we speak unkindly to someone's face, we can see hurt. We can see pain. But our devices take that connection, that physical connection, and break it off so that we can no longer see a person's eyes fill with tears or the red climbing into their cheeks. We have lost the ability to be ashamed of ourselves for these comments, and I think that in this, we are losing the ability to communicate with each other as a whole.
And now for our daily Video of a Novel (which you can receive each and every day by becoming a paid subscriber!):
The second act of most books takes up anywhere from 45,000 to 60,000 words--it's where we spend most of our time as novelists. Yet the middle can be the most difficult part to write, because it's not the exciting beginning or the satisfying ending. It's just...the middle.
So today in the video I'm talking about how to approach the messy middle. What are some strategies for writing a good second act? And how should we think about this main section of the book?