part0009

Despite being such an avid reader, I’m mostly a visual learner. If I can watch a video or see a diagram of something, I’m not only more likely to remember it, but more likely to understand it as well. When I read a great novel, I don’t see words on the page as much as a movie playing out in my head. There’s a reason you’ll find more and more images as we get into later, more difficult chapters.

Knowing the type of learner you are is important for your own novel as well. When you think about your story, what do you see?

If you’re as visual as I am, then I imagine we share a similar experience—you see a movie playing behind your eyelids. Of course, you may be more musically inclined, or maybe a series of words really is how you envision your story.

There’s really no right or wrong here, so before we get into today’s goals, take a moment to consider what kinds of media you’re most drawn to—images, music, words, a mix of all three, or something else entirely .

Today will be all about cultivating a collection of this chosen media, designed to spark your imagination and get you into the world of your story. Music will help you feel the mood of a scene. Images will help you imagine a setting, while quotes might echo the voice of a future character. Even videos might come into play!

Ultimately, regardless of the type of media you collect, these supporting materials will not only be helpful, but essential as you create scenes, settings, and characters later on.

At this point in the challenge, you should have a single core idea—your premise—and potentially some scenes and characters to go with it. Today, you’ll begin expanding that idea by bringing in outside inspiration to add depth and substance to your story.

Would this landscape make a good setting for my hero’s home planet? Does this piece of music match the tone I want for an intense final battle? Asking these sorts of questions will stretch your story from a single vision into a network of potential ideas.

To start this process, you’ll need to gather different pieces of media en masse, with your goal being to create a collection of at least one hundred items.

While this may sound like a lot at first glance, you should have a wide variety to choose from. Your collection might contain images, music, movie clips, quotes, poems, excerpts from other stories, or even diagrams—basically anything you can think of. You’re even welcome to sketch a few pictures of your own !

However, you don’t want to simply gather up anything you come across. Each piece of media you collect needs to be relevant to the story you want to tell. This is why you created your premise yesterday—you’ll need to keep it in mind as you conduct your search, so make sure it's handy.

Of course, that raises the question of how you’ll find this media and where you’ll keep it. Personally, I think a computer makes the most sense for this. The Internet gives you access to anything you could imagine, and you can easily save most things to a folder on your desktop. This is especially true if your draft outline is already digital.

However, I still encourage you to use a computer even if you’re outlining in a binder or notebook. Later on you may choose to print out images or add quotes directly to your outline, but for now, gather your chosen media digitally. We’ll be revisiting it again in a few moments.

With that said, you can begin searching.

This process will inevitably take some time, but I encourage you to limit yourself to two hours. This will not only keep you focused, but it’ll prevent you from falling down the rabbit hole that is the Internet—something far too easy to do. Instead of searching for the absolute best photo of a neon lit city for thirty minutes, give yourself permission to find four or five good images in a fraction of the time. Remember that we’ll be returning to these materials in a few minutes, so they don’t need to be perfect just yet.

You’ll hopefully find this process moves quickly at first, since you should already have a mental image of at least a few elements of your story. This means you can base your search on what you already know:

However, as your collection creeps closer to one hundred, you may start feeling stuck. You don’t want to gather a ton of duplicate material—ten photos of a snowy tree might be too many—so what do you do?

Well, for starters, being stuck here is a good thing. It means you’re pushing your ideas beyond their current boundaries and discovering new and interesting ways to expand your story. Still, that doesn’t help the frustration this causes, especially when you don’t want to waste a ton of time during your two-hour limit.

So, here are some prompts to help you move forward:

It’s possible you won’t have answers for some of these questions just yet, or that they may not apply to your story at all. That’s ok! You’ll get to explore these questions and others like them later on, so for now, they’re simply here to help inspire you.

Once you reach one hundred items or hit two hours—whichever comes first—you’ve finished this phase. Time to start sorting.

When you begin the sorting phase, you should have a large mass of different media stored in one common place. That’s certainly helpful, but for these items to be truly beneficial you’ll want to curate them.

Fortunately, this step is fairly simple—all you need to do is go through your collection and separate them into common categories that can be as generic or specific as you’d like. Personally, I like to do this using separate folders on my desktop. Here are some categories to consider:

Of course, you’ll probably end up tweaking these to fit your specific story. You may have a folder dedicated to your main character, and it could include photos of what they look like, clips of music that represents their personality, or images of their home. Even if you use the generic categories above, make sure they feel intuitive to you. You’ll be referencing these categories a lot over the next few days, so having them organized will be a huge relief.

This also extends to what you put in each category. As you gathered items, you should have begun forming a clearer vision of your story. Your old ideas may have changed, with new ideas taking their place. This means your current collection could end up with a lot of extra “stuff” if you’re not careful. Therefore, the last part of the sorting phase is to remove this extraneous “stuff” from your final collection.

You want your categories to be bite-sized representations of the various places, people, objects, and events you hope to explore in your story—essentially a curated museum of your inspiration. They should all have a similar tone and feel, because you’re trying to create a cohesive story. Leaving excess media will only make it harder to reference your collection down the road.

So, before moving on, browse through the collection you’ve created and consider each item you’ve included. Does it still fit with your vision of your story? If not, send it to the recycling bin .

By now, you’ve hopefully developed a clearer picture of where your novel is going. Even if you already had a strong sense of your story when you started this challenge, creating a curated collection of media always results in a few new ideas being added to the mix.

This means your final task for today is to make a record of those new ideas. Whether you completely rethought your story's direction or just tweaked a few elements, you’ll still want to write down how your story has evolved. Yesterday, your draft outline only had your premise at the top, so now is your opportunity to add the extra details.

Skipping to a line below your premise, write a few notes describing your story. What happens, where does it take place, who is involved, and where do they go? Again, you may not have answers to all of these, or your answers may still be vague, but that’s ok. There’s no need to go into tons of detail quite yet.

Of course, this may leave you wondering—what about the collection you just created? How does that fit into your draft outline?

The answer to this is largely up to you, but here’s my recommendation: leave your collection on its own for now, especially if you’re outlining on paper.

While you’re more than welcome to print out images and quotes if you’d like to, keeping it digital will not only save you printer ink, but it'll preserve your collection in an easy-to-use format. Digital simply makes the most sense for this step. However, even if you’re already outlining on your computer, keeping your collection separate will likely be the best choice for now—and this is especially true since your draft outline will undergo a major overhaul at the end of this challenge.

So, for now, keep your collection in a dedicated folder on an USB drive or backed up in some other form.

By now, your draft outline should have:

While it may seem trivial to spend two hours wandering around the Internet in search of pictures of trees, castles, and spaceship, I want to give you an idea of how important this collection will be—and not just for this challenge.

If you think of your novel as a house, then you know it needs a few basic parts: a foundation, a roof, walls, et cetera. Your premise is your novel’s foundation, and later on we’ll be building the other structural elements that’ll hold your story together.

However, even a structurally perfect house would be barren without something inside it. That’s why today was all about developing your novel’s personality. Just like a house needs paint, furniture, and someone to live there, your collection will help you add the places, characters, and colors that bring your story’s world to life.

Most importantly, this collection will do more than help you create a better outline.

When you go to write your first draft, your outline and your collection will be there to serve as blueprints for your story. Specifically, your collection will be there to spark your imagination when the right words don’t come to you, when you’ve forgotten how a scene feels, or when you’ve lost touch with the settings and characters you’ve created. Through your collection, you can reorient yourself with the places and people of your novel, even in the face of the most severe writer’s block—and that’s a very valuable thing.

Tomorrow we’ll push your premise to its limit, but for now, here are the goals you’ve completed for Day Two: