Alexandra Sokoloff's Blog

Nanowrimo cheat sheet

Here’s your cheat sheet for Nanowrimo. Or for just writing a book or script!

Theoretically, you could schedule your four weeks of Nanowrimo by dedicating one week to each quarter of your story: Act I, Act II: Part 1, Act II: Part 2, and Act III.

Realistically, I think you should be thrilled if you get even halfway through a first draft in a month. That’s huge! Anything you do in just one month is almost inevitably more like an expanded outline (what the film business calls a treatment) than what...

Level up your writing – with holiday movies!

As we get down to the wire on these holidays—I mean, move joyously into the festive season—it gets harder and harder to find time to write. I know! So I wanted to do a movie-centric post to help you get in some stealth craft work during family time.

NOTHING will take your writing to the next level faster than watching movies for story structure.

I say this so often I worry about people not hearing me on it anymore. But –

If you can take the time to watch just three movies with intention—looking ...

Nanowrimo Now What? — Rewriting

So you did Nanowrimo! Huzzah!!

Now what?

Or maybe you didn’t do Nano, but you now have a rough draft—maybe a very, very, very rough draft— of your book or script. Huzzah!!

Now what?

First of all, Take a break. If at all possible, when you’ve finished a first draft, take a break of not just days, but a couple of weeks.

You should keep to a writing schedule, start brainstorming the next project, maybe do some random collaging to see what images come up that might lead to something fantastic...

Nanowrimo Week 2: Team, Training, Tests

Here’s a simple way to remember the basics of Act II: Part 1—the second quarter of your book or script:

Team, Training, TestsTHE TEAM is the friends, relatives, colleagues, and/or experts that will help the hero/ine get their DESIRE.

The hero/ine’s TEAM will be introduced in the second act if they haven’t already been introduced in Act I—and Act II:1 is where we’ll get to know and love them.

In fact there is often an entire sequence you could call ASSEMBLING THE TEAM, which often comes early in...

Nanowrimo daily prompts

For the month of Nano I’m doing a weekly post running down the most important story elements of each Act, with links to expanded articles on each element.

In case you missed them, here are the Act I posts:

Nanowrimo: 10 Essential Elements of Act INanowrimo Act I Cheat Sheet

I’m also going to do a daily prompt or trick, which I’ll do in Substack’s Notes feature.

(Go to Notes.)

You will NOT get an email for every Note I post!

But if you WANT notifications of Notes, maybe especially for this mo...

Nanowrimo Day 1: If you’re stuck, skip ahead!

For the month of Nano I’m doing a weekly post running down the most important story elements of each Act, with links to expanded articles on each element.

In case you missed them, here are the Act I posts:

Nanowrimo: 10 Essential Elements of Act INanowrimo Act I Cheat Sheet

I’m also going to do a daily prompt or trick, which I’ll do in Substack’s Notes feature.

(Go to Notes.)

You will NOT get an email for every Note I post!

But if you WANT notifications of Notes, maybe especially for this mo...

Nanowrimo: 10 Essential Elements of Act I

Here are ten must-have story elements of Act I, no matter what genre you’re working in!

If you can write out these elements of your book or script, you will be in great shape to launch into Nanowrimo, if you’re doing it—or to jump-start your book or script, whether you’re doing Nano or not.

First, let’s see these elements in a in a narrative that gives you the basic flow of Act I.

We meet the HERO/INE in their ORDINARY WORLD.

They have:

AGHOST or WOUND or BAGGAGE, something that ...

Is my story idea BIG enough? — What is High Concept?

“Write what you most want to write” is always good advice. But let’s face it. If you want to make money at writing, there are business considerations to— consider.

So let’s talk about High Concept and the Big Book.

But first:

If this is your very first book or script, the most important thing is to find an idea that you can finish:An idea and characters and world that you can fall in love with, enough to keep you writing every day, at least for 15 minutes a day, for nine months or a year.An i...

What’s Your PREMISE? — Identifying the ACTION LINE of your story

This is my entire message for today:

WRITE OUT YOUR PREMISE.

Whether you’re doing Preptober/Nanowrimo or not — no matter where you are in your book or script— I really urge you to do this TODAY.

Writing out your Premise sentence is an exercise you should be doing periodically through your writing process, to make sure you’re remembering the SPINE of your story.No one ever has to see this premise sentence. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It is not going to go on the back cover of your book. It’s ...

Preptober and Nanowrimo: Write that book!

In case there’s anyone who doesn’t know, November is Nanowrimo – National Novel Writing Month. The goal of Nanowrimo is to bash through 50,000 words of a novel in a single month.

I could not be more supportive of this idea—it gives focus and a nice juicy competitive edge—I mean, crowd support!—to an endeavor that can seem completely overwhelming when you’re facing it all on your own. Through peer pressure and the national and international focus on the event, Nanowrimo forces would-be writers—an...