Novel Writing - Day Four

June 4, 2008

Today was my fourth day of working on the first of two novels testing out different drafting / outlining programs. According to the program I’m following in First Draft in 30 Days, I’m on Day 7 (I finished some other aspects up quicker than scheduled), which is the first of my research days. There won’t be anything too exciting to report while I spend the next few days to a week or so researching.

I’m starting out with 25 general items on my research list (I’m sure I’ll add more as I get more involved with the writing down the road). Today I started looking at the more basic topics where I needed more easily-accessible research (basic background and such).

Today was spent doing nothing more than finding reputable online sources for information on 10 of those 25 topics, and bookmarking them for later reference. Tomorrow will probably be more of the same for the rest of the topics, which will then allow me to figure out which topics will require additional primary research such as interviews, so I can start trying to set things up or digging deeper for other information.

And that’s really all I did today for the project. While reviewing some of the sources, I did learn a few things already that I found interesting, and which I’ll definitely have to apply to the story, so I’d say it’s off to a good start.