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Time has not been on my side this week juggling work commitments with my burning desire to spend time writing so that I can reach the end of the first act of my story where I’m excitedly struggling to keep up with the new direction my plot is heading off in and my head is spinning around the plot of my story-line.

The best part about my writing life is that I have so much in the way of resources to work with.  I love books and have many shelves (and desk space) full of reference books, dictionaries and thesauruses and I use creative writing books to help myself get through what I term ‘blank spells’.  Three particular books that live on my desk are Outlining Your Novel, by K M Weiland, Outlining Your Novel Workbook, also by K M Weiland, and a firm favourite is Alan Watt’s The-90-Day Novel.

My wonderful and necessary collection of dictionaries and thesauruses include an enormous Collins Concise Dictionary (more often used for pressing flowers than word-searching), my Original Roget's Thesaurus and John Seely’s Oxford A-Z of Grammar & Punctuation.  There is also more than sufficient online resources that I use regularly and refer to often whilst writing which are bookmarked on my browser for ease of access.  Among these a few of my favourites are:

www.businesswritingblog.com – Lynn Gaertner-Johnston’s fabulous and comprehensive site for grammar, syntax, proofreading symbols, and so much more.  It is a business writing site but the writing resource section is tremendous if you’re looking for specific information.

www.edufind.com – The English Grammar tab provides guidelines and rule for everything you need to know about the correct use of English grammar.

www.Rinkworks.com – I can spend hours on this site.  My favourite is the Hobbies section, particularly Fun with Words and Fantasy Name Generator. 

One of the best writing blogs I've come across and eagerly subscribe to is K M Weiland’s site www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com.  Signing up to this newsletter is one of the best things I've ever done and there are fab resources including a superb Story Structure Database.

Another favourite of mine is author Jody Hedlund's blog http://jodyhedlund.blogspot.co.uk which I find refreshingly honest and often very helpful, written from the heart of a story-teller.

An aspect of story writing that I constantly struggle with is avoiding clichés and storylines that have all been covered before, a million times over, and the constant search for unique characters, plots, scenarios and narratives can often have the effect of slamming the creative door tightly shut.  Pursuing Alan Watt’s the 90-day novel (although, in my case, it is comfortably stretching to the 90-week novel) has opened up the writing experience for me in so many ways and I have found it to be one of the easiest guides to follow.  The day-by-day tutoring provides a writing exercise at the end of each section, and at the end of each week there is homework and a bullet point list of thoughts and reminders.

At first I struggled with the stream-of-consciousness writing exercises because I have never thought about my characters in such depth before.  I persevered, however, and when I found that I didn't have the capacity to write about my characters in relation to the topic of the exercise I left a space to return to it at a later point, though I didn't like the feeling it left me with because I realised that I didn't know my characters as well as I thought I did and now had to introduce the complexities of their natures and personalities.

A defining moment came when I reached Day 8 of the book and the introduction of the three-act story structure.  I realised then that all of the guides and advice on story structure and outlining I have read over the years have never managed to clarify the process for me in the way this book has.  My Day 8 stretched into several weeks as I poured over my three-act story structure until the final eureka moment when I realised that I finally had what I’d been missing all along.

Writing the first draft begins on Day 29 and although, in terms of the book, I've only reached Day 36, I am loving writing my story, having only now, five months later, reached the end of act one where I will begin fleshing out the current outline and ideas that lead up to the beginning of Act Two.