Today’s exercise works best if you can do it with at least two other people. You’ll all read the passage below from Hilda van Stockum’s wonderful book The Winged Watchman. (http://www.amazon.com/Winged-Watchman-Living-History-Library/dp/1883937078/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265747756&sr=8-1_)

You’ll each then take a piece of paper, go off alone for 15 minutes, and write your answer to the question: What happens next? [...]

A Novel is More than a Beginning and an End

Here are some novel facts:

Most average novels run between 55,000-80,000 words.
A “long novel” is considered to be a novel upwards of 80,000 words and stopping at about 100,000.

No matter how you hammer them on the page, that’s a lot of words.

When, for the first time ever, [...]