Day 1 : Write a 100 word novel in a week!

My first inspirational email for the competition...

Day 1.

Like me, you've probably sat down and done the maths, and realized that today you need to write 15 words of your 100 word novel today if you're going to finish it in seven days (and have the weekend off). That may seem a daunting task given that you've also been worrying a plot, theme, and whether there are too many slides in your O2 segmentation presentation, but honestly: 15 words aren't really that many.

Instead of obsessing about the words, you might want to decide what to do with them, and a useful trick is to use them to introduce your protagonist.

Here is an opening line from entirely fictitious novel to inspire you:

"Ugly as sin, and with breath bad enough to turn a bus blue, Frank wasn't the first person that sprang to mind when she needed as shoulder to cry on."

See? Easy. We've introduced two characters for the price of one, and while our heroine may need fleshing out a bit, we now have Frank on board. And we've burnt through thirty words of our novel as well, which means we can slack off on Day 2 and hit the Westbridge.

If you'd rather leave the whole character thing for later, how about setting the scene?

"It was a bed sit fit only for the lowest of trailer trash looking to move up in the world on the cheap, and she knew she would have to work fast when she discovered the corpse in the dirt black bed."

Scene set, forty words in the bag, and fourteen hours and fifty-three minutes of the day left to do some real work.

So get the coffee on, remember not to spend too long sat at the keyboard (RSI and back pain and all that), bang out 15 words, and tomorrow we'll tackle Day 2.



Funt - it ain't easy, but then freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose