Blog Post #10

In today's edition of 'how on earth will I get through this before NaNoWriMo?' we have exercise 16, Compare Yourself to Published Authors. Published authors probably did their Nano planning, so we're off to a bad start already.

This exercise asked you to pick a scene you'd read recently that made you have an emotional reaction. I picked a scene from Wool by Hugh Howey, which I'm slowly making my way through.

Wool is very good at making me have emotional reactions. I picked a scene which I read about seven hours ago, on my lunch break at work. It was so good that I was nearly late back to work because I didn't want to stop reading.

The next step of this exercise was to write the scene out in your own words, and then compare it to the original scene. Honest hour: I skipped a step here - you were supposed to write out the original scene, but I'm rapidly running out of time so I didn't.

I don't think this exercise was as effective as it could have been, because I sort of rushed it. I do think I picked a good genre, however, because this is similar to the sort of thing I'll be including in my Nano novel.

I did learn that I need to work on my pacing a bit - I think I let the reader relax too much in the scene, when it really needed constant tension. As a result, the ending fell a bit flat.

However, I did notice I used commas and rhetorical questions to good effect. I also came up with some good descriptions.

This is another exercise I'd like to repeat later on, once I've done a bit more work on the novel. I think this exercise has the potential to be very helpful.