Budding Novelist

So last night was my first novel writing class. The class was great! The only downside is that the other members of the class are all 40 years old or older, but it's all good I think I'll be less hesitant to be honest in my writing since there won't be some hot 30 year old in class to intimidate me. The class is really fast paced. We spent the first 30-40 minutes learning about a particular aspect of novel writing then we do a quick writing activity and then the rest of the class we'll be reading pages from our novel for others to critique (anywhere from 1pg to 10 pgs). I was nervous when he said up to ten pages, I didn't think I could possibily write 10 pages a week. Plus I have so many ideas and didn't know where to start.

Luckily our writing activity got me started. So much so that when I went home I wrote about 3 pages and started an overall chapter/section outline. I think my genre is going to be autobiographical, but with creative freedoms.

Our writing activity last night was to take one of two infamous opening lines and put on our twists on it without using the words "was" or "it."
The two choices were:
- It was a dark and stormy night.
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

So basically we needed to craft an opening sectence/ first few paragraphs that would draw people in. It didn't have to reflect the novel we wanted to write, but I figured these exercises would help me focus so I chose to use my ideas for my novel I hope to write.

Please remember this is a rough draft, but enjoy!

4:58PM on August 4th officially marked my 24th birthday. I spent the night with friends in New York City, quite possibly the best night I’d had in a while. Little did I know my 24th year would be full of some of the worst times in my life as well. Looking back I should have known better. In the first few hours of my 24th birthday I had been running extremely late, got a train’s door closed on me (which left bruises by the way), practically missed my birthday dinner all together, broke my friend’s bed and had a hang over from hell the next morning thanks to free box wine at the Chinese restaurant we ate at. Usually my life is chaotic and most of the time I can handle the chaos, but when I couldn’t on stressful days like my birthday that year I had my dad to always calm me down and know what to say to make me feel better. However I didn’t know that by the time I reached my 25th birthday I wouldn’t have my dad anymore to help me sort through life’s ups and downs. My name is XXX, welcome to my quarter life catharsis.


As you can see I haven't chose a name for my main character yet. The character will basically be me, but I want to use different names for most people and places. So I want you to help me name my main character. Post comments with your ideas please!

Oh and I plan on also calling my novel, My Quarter Life Catharsis, which hopefully I can tie the blog in a some point. We'll see.


PS - on a random site note: parking on campus has got waaaay better since it is now a few weeks into the semester. I'm able to park in the lot I had been parking in all summer which is a quick walk and out the outskirts of campus so I don't have to sit in traffic in the morning :)