The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within
Alan Watt
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0983141207
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Alan Watt wrote the first draft of his novel Diamond Dogs in just under 90 days, and later sold the North American rights for $500,000 to Little, Brown in a bidding war. The book became a national bestseller, won a slew of awards and is soon to be a major motion picture.
Get the first draft down quickly! The 90-Day Novel is a day-by-day guide through the process of getting the first draft of your novel onto the page. The 90-Day Novel was workshopped at LA Writers' Lab over three years and has helped hundreds of writers complete their work. Some of Watt's students have gone on to become bestselling authors and win major literary awards.
The 90-Day Novel is structured into three parts. Part One describes the process of getting your story from the imagination to the page and prepares you, through a few simple, powerful writing exercises to access the story within. Part Two is a series of 90 daily letters that will guide you through the hero's journey. Writers often tend to get stuck halfway through, mired somewhere in their "idea" of the story. The 90-Day Novel will show you how and why you got stuck, and how to get to the end of your first draft. Part Three is a compendium of stream-of-consciousness writing exercises designed to help you access the primal forces in your story, as well as the Structure Questions that will invite up images at key stages in your hero's journey.
to town to investigate and offer his services. A man is having an affair with a woman, and through the story his relationship alters. The high school beauty queen, crippled by the accident, confronts her abuser.” It is traditionally structured while told from the point of view of four protagonists. There is an inciting incident (the bus crash). A decision is made (lawyer arrives in town to profit from the tragedy) that forces the town to relive the experience. A surrender takes place as the
up for disappointment. I decided to throw myself into it, and leave the results to the gods. There was a weird giddiness in the group. They weren’t fretting over how difficult it would be; instead they asked, “Isn’t this impossible?” and I thought to myself . . . um, yeah. It struck me that when we are confronted with the impossible, we let go of our expectations and that’s when miracles tend to happen. When the focus shifts from “Will it be good?” to “Will it get done?” our subconscious is free
surprise us. To some degree, we are embodying our hero’s journey. How can we not? This is part of what makes the process so thrilling. We are invested. On some level, we are exploring our own lives and making meaning out of what we discover. This is important to remember as we approach this stage in our story, because the urgent need that initially roused us is now coming up for review. We are being invited to question all that we have come to believe about what our hero wants. Fears may
DIAMOND DOGS SAMPLE OUTLINE ACT ONE OPENING: Desert. Present day. Neil Garvin, high school football player, is at a house party. His girlfriend rebuffs his advances. He gets drunk and abuses Ian Curtis, a younger schoolmate. THEME/DILEMMA: Neil wants connection but he’s afraid that if anyone knew who he was, they would not like him. He fears that he did something terrible in his past that caused his mother to leave. Though logically he understands this to be irrational, he is powerless
narrative drive. The narrative drive is not the plot, but the underlying meaning that drives the plot. To develop a relationship to the antagonists in our story. Without a clear sense of the antagonistic forces, we’ll be in bondage to our fixed ideas of the story. Let’s get started. THE FEAR EXERCISE Write for five minutes, as fast as you can, beginning with the sentence: “I’m afraid to write this story because . . .” Nothing is too trivial. And be willing to write the forbidden. Make a