Image Copyright Larissa Kulik, 2013. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.

Now that I’ve come up with this idea, I need to test it. Would it be too ambitious to write a scene a day? Would writing a scene or two a week be more realistic? I’m looking to render experience, characters, and places, after all, not to crank out more words and ideas than I know what to do with. I have to be careful. Words and ideas come so easily to me that I could get buried in them. What I need to save me from pointless verbiage is craft. I can cut away the excess and sail my way toward the books I mean to write by making myself at home in craft. That means slowing down, focusing, writing with intention. That means writing a first draft generatively and filling in details in the second and subsequent drafts. That means doing lots of revision.

So it’s official. I’m going to spend a month—probably November—writing a scene or two a week, maybe every day. I feel like a genius. I’ll bet this has never been done before.… Well, bummer. It turns out September is Scene-a-Day month—at least over at Go Into the Story by screenwriter and teacher Scott Meyers. If I start in November, I’ll be more than a month late!

Should I scratch my plan? Because I’m talking books, after all, not babies, and I can gestate indefinitely if I like. No, I’m going to go through with it. Because I want to birth another book. And I know I need a plan.

Scott Meyers suggests writing a scene every week day, which was 21 days in September. He limits scenes to two pages. That’s about 600 words a day, which is plenty. Not that I’m counting. It’s working the scene that’s important.

In case any of you want to do this with me—create your own scene-a-day practice—I’ve listed some resources below to help us get started:

• Before writing a scene—or while writing a scene—you might want to play with voice. Find out what Dorothy Allison said about using voice as a way to enter a story in this Quote of the Week post on my blog.
• In his September 2 post Meyers offers general scene-writing suggestions that could apply as easily to fiction and creative nonfiction as to screenwriting.
• Start on this page to link to all of Meyers’s September scene-writing prompts. I especially like this post about reversals.
• Fiction and fantasy author Kay Kenyon offers excellent advice on keeping a scene list. I started a scene list on the plane to New Mexico en route to the AROHO retreat in August. Now I need to organize it. Kay’s post helps!
• Two historical romance authors—Jody Hedlund and Kay Dacus—offer advice on planning scenes and using scene cards. These gals are organized!
• Award-winning mystery writer Tricia Fields describes the Excel spreadsheet she uses to outline scenes.
• This pdf is a simple scene outline form, for a single scene, from Creative Writing Now.
• Jennifer Lauck, author of The New York Times bestseller Blackbird, offers great advice on writing scenes in creative nonfiction.

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