Writing Exercise: Week Three

[fridayschild85]

 Week two's homework was to read novels, and I did.

In the spirit of tracking my progress through Novel in a Year, here's what I read:

• Boomsday by Christopher Buckley
• Oodles of fan fiction from SG-1 and SVU Land, including some stories that were long enough to be novels
• National Geographic's June edition (Not a novel, I know, but if you can get your hands on a copy, I highly recommend you read "Feeding the World". It was an awesome article.)
• Unembedded: Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting by Scott Taylor (Again, not strictly a novel, but Taylor's a phenomenal story-teller, so I decided it counted.)

And now for this week's assignment: write down, in plain English, clearly and concisely, why you want to write a novel. 

It sounds pretty easy, right?

Wrong. I've been mulling it over for the last three days, ever since I read this week's chapter. I've had a lot of false starts since then, scribbled on whatever scraps of paper were within arm's reach when something popped into my head. As the little pile of answers grew bigger and bigger, I realized the exercise is so difficult because there are many reasons why I want to write a novel.

I phrased them a little differently each time I tried to commit them to paper, but there are essentially three reasons I want to write a novel. Here they are:

1. I want to write a novel because it will allow me to exercise my imagination in a way that other forms of writing can't.
2. I want to write a novel because I have ideas that I want to share with others.
3. I want to write a novel because I love playing with language and assembling words to create something that is both meaningful and interesting.

So what if Doughty only intended the exercise to generate a single sentence? I'm taking initiative!
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