2. Don’t stop to think. Don’t write too fast. Don’t waste time crafting exquisite paragraphs—they will perish in your rewrite.
3. Write short lines, short sentences down the page.
She slugged him.
He fell backwards.
She hit him with a skillet.
Blood popped from his ear.
(Hint: the short line forces you to look at your verbs.)
4. Use strong verbs. Shoot, dance, spin, whirl, claw, jab, slice, chop, lob, whack, whip, lash drop, gallop, trot, slug, etc.
5. Pack each line with objects: wardrobe items, vehicles, jewelry, weapons, tools, kitchen implements, money in envelopes, money in attaches, hundred dollar bills on the crap table, furniture, rocks, trees, scars, car parts, bathroom soap (what does it smell like?).
6. If a paragraph cries out to be written, go for it. But DO NOT REWRITE OR RESHAPE OR TOUCH UP THE PARAGRAPH! Because when you touch it up, even a tiny bit, then you are editing and…
7. …the least little edit wakes up your internal editor—and the editor will chastise your fertile unconscious—and you got trouble. In the first 100 pages, keep your editor on downers.
8. Forget all the crap about rough draft and final draft. Forget about ridiculous goals like writing 50,000 bad words in 30 days. Go for story. Go for character. Go for rhetoric. Go deep.
9. Write pieces of scenes—setting, character onstage, dialogue, action, intruder—but don’t stop to polish the scene because there’s a good chance you’ll cut it when you rewrite. For the first 100 pages, scenes are placeholders.
10. Push past page 50. You’re entering the unknown territory of your unwritten novel, no road signs, no map, the elusive elf of fame dancing like a mirage in your headlights. If you get past page 50, you are way ahead of most would-be novelists.
11. Be brave. You won’t know what your novel is about—sex, danger, loss, pain, betrayal, genetic success, education, space travel, love, King Replacement—until you claw your way to page 100. Be brave.
12. Write about your characters. Name, sex, age, home, education, income, vehicle, wardrobe stuff, childhood trauma that haunts, because you are seeking motivation.
13. Write about connections between the three main characters: protagonist, antagonist, and helper. The two big connections are blood (family, genetics, sibling rivalry, parental rule, childhood rebellion) and money (greed, need, want, robbery, betrayal, homicide). Other connections: teacher-student, officer-enlisted man, warden-guard-felon, boss-employee, hooker-client, cop-snitch, high-school love birds, etc.
14. Write the first encounter between the protagonist and antagonist. (Link to scene-writing.)
15. If you yearn for feedback, share a few pages, not with your spouse, but with your fellow writers—nuts like you who want to write novels. Take notes. Don’t argue. Don’t say, “But what I really meant was…” If you feel bad, cry. Then get back to short lines down the page.
16. When you reach page 75 (in a projected novel of 300 pages, you’re at Plot Point One), write 10 sentences about your Midpoint—what happens before and after page 150. (Hint: here you are probing your novel’s structure.)
17. Do a mind-map (words in bubbles, bubbles linked by lines on the page) of your novel so far. What’s in the bubble at the center? How are your characters connected? What are your 5 key objects? Which character controls the Resource Base? What lurks in the bubbles way out there on the edge?
18. On page 90, define your Resource Base. What do your characters want? What will they kill for? What will they die for? Examples: The RB in Water World is dirt. The RB in Moby-Dick is blubber. The RB in Jane Eyre is Mr. Rochester’s money, symbolized by Thornfield Hall. In Road Warrior, the RB is gasoline. In As Good as it Gets, the RB is Melvin’s money. The RB in Cinderella is the Royal Castle, a sanctuary for an orphan girl who loses her slipper.
19. Push your way to page 100. If you don’t have a writing group—where you write with other writers using a timer—get one together now. (Hint: critique groups are useless except for leaving writerly blood on the floor. Critique will kill your first 100 pages.)
20. Page 100. You are here. Take some deep breaths. Do a 180 and look back across the road you have built as you traveled. Check out the road signs, the detours and dead-ends.
Read what you wrote.
Take notes.
Then write the next 100 pages.
Short lines, no editing, nose close to the page, and when you get rolling, around page 127, use this startline:
“My story climaxes
in a scene called X
where the protagonist
battles the antagonist for….”
