5 day writing challenge

Writing can be hard. There’s the plot to think about, character consistency, showing instead of telling, sticking to beats and on top of all of this, it should be enjoyable AND believable. This week I’m launching my 5 day writing challenge to help you work through some major writing pain points.

These exercises are designed to help you create from scratch so that you can think critically about what you want your characters to do. One exercise which I gave the class in my BluePrint Self Publishing Crash Course encouraged writers to make their characters uncomfortable in the opening scene. Doing this not only made them create characters with very specific motivations but also with very specific flaws.

I’ll go a step further for this challenge and ask you to do the following. Please commit to spending 30 minutes each day on this challenge. If you touch your story every day, you’d be surprised at how much sharper your characters remain in your mind. Also, don’t use any of your current WIPs. Start from scratch. That way you’ll have a clean slate which will give you the room you need to let your character make mistakes and grow. Ready? Let’s go!

Day 1. Your character is lost - whether metaphorically or literally, let your character start your story in a strange place. It could be a good place, like a beautiful meadow that allows them to reflect or a decidedly bad place like a dark New York alley at midnight (this literally happened to me once; 10 out of 10 do NOT recommend). But I digress.

Day 2. Things take a turn - Whether the earth beneath that meadow begin to shake or an alien spaceship descends on that alley, something needs to go down. By no means is it fatal but your character will suddenly be plunged into a life-changing situation that will shift everything they thought they knew about life.

3. A glimmer of hope - That earthquake could make your MC realise life isn’t worth living in an unhappy marriage. Those aliens could actually be in that alley on an important mission and your MC is the only person who can help. Whatever it is, your character MUST make a choice and that choice will have consequences. If she stays with her husband, she will forever wonder about the path not taken since she came so close to death. Maybe that escalates things in a more subtle way. If she leaves, she’s abandoning her home and the life she knew for the unknown.

4. Uh oh - The problem with choices is that the consequences keep on coming way down the road. But by now there’s no turning back and your character is desperate to salvage everything that matters to them. What happens to them? What choice will they make in a last ditch effort to change the game?

5. Bring it home - Give us a beautiful, satisfying ending. Or not… Have you seen the Challengers movie? No spoilers but I’ll just say it has a somewhat nebulous ending that might leave some people wondering what really happens. But viewers will clearly have expressed their own personal opinion of what really happened. Either way, at the end of your story, your character’s conflict should be resolved and you should be able to leave your reader with some comfort that their alien abduction/near death experience took them on an incredible life changing journey that shifted their belief system and changed their life.

Good luck!

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