Novel Writing Workshop

I went to a novel writing workshop today.  The speaker was Waverly Fitzgerald, an author and writing coach.  It was free.  Free is good.  We did some exercises on building characters, plot and scenes.  However, I didn't learn much that I hadn't already read about in books, though I did pick up a tip or two from her.  The whole workshop was in preparation for NaNoWriMo next month ("National Novel Writing Month" where people set out to complete a novel in a month - in case the name didn't quite tell you.  He, he).  I figured, why not?  It's free, it's two blocks away and I'll be amongst other writers either in the middle of or at the beginning stages of writing a novel. 

The best exercise we did was actually taking the first incident (called many things from the 'call to action', 'inciting incident' and others - the thing that sets off the story) and doing a web of linked bubbles to that incident to think of what may happen in response to what happens (externally, internally, interpersonally, etc.).  I may use this idea many times, to build characters, plot points and other things.  Many books have told me to try this, but now that I have actually done it I realize why every single book on writing that I have read has mentioned something like this exercise.  It's really just a thought process on trying to see where the story could go, not necessarily where it will go. 

Right now, I'm also taking what I learned in the workshop to develop character sketches, or character back stories/histories.  There are many ways that this can be done, but I think at least for the main characters I am going to write out a mini story on a conversation with the character.  This is actually kind of fun!  It does take longer to do than just doing bullet points, but this helped me to realize something else - I write better when I know it's not going into the book!  How horrible is that?  Each sentence is coming easier and the writing is much more fluid as I just freewrite and let the character 'talk' to me.  Maybe this sounds a bit schitzo to some, but it really works!  So far I've only started on my main character, Synovee, and I'll do the same thing for the other main character, Anova, and some of the minor characters as well.  It's just too much work to do for everyone, though I will develop a background of sorts for each of the characters that 'matter' in the novel.

I'm glad that I went to the workshop, if only because it gave me a couple of pointers to take away and hopefully make some aspects of the writing process easier.