Breakout Novel Workbook Complete

Yesterday I made a final push and completed all the exercises in Don Maas' Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.  Essentially, these are the exercises that Maas uses in his live "Breakout Novel Workshops." There are nearly 600 different tasks that the workbook calls for, most of which each involve writing two to three paragraphs for your novel.  All told, I ended up writing almost 100 pages of text, some of it in note form, but much of it in narrative form that I can directly use in the book.

And most of it is usable.  Maas' books aren't about writing technique; they are more writing prompts that get you thinking about your story in ways you hadn't considered.  Some of the results of his exercises were, in my opinion, not as good as the way I originally approached the topic under study, but by far the majority of the paragraphs I wrote for these exercises are better than what I had before.

In short, it's a huge amount of work, but is time well spent.  The only challenge is maintaining your critical eye so that you can see when what you had written previously is better and when you just think it's better.