Tim ClaresCouch to 80K writing podcastis a delightful, intense, encouraging eight-week journey towards writing a novel.

If you want to know more, keep reading, but be aware that here be spoilers.

Okay, just us?

At first I thought Id listen to a few episodes to see if it was worth recommending.

Instead, it drew me in and I completed the whole course.

Ever since I finished, I miss hearing Tim Clares encouraging and slightly angry voice every day.

But that pleasure can now be yours.

Thats not possible at the speed of human typing, nor longhand, which he recommends.

60-100k is probably a more representative range.

Oh, and I guess it was slightly a reaction to NaNoWriMo calling a novel 50k.

Some weeks have an optional reflections episode at the end.

Youll be journeying into your past, and plagiarizing classic works of literature and mutating them.

This is all true.

Dont think of each days writing as a chapter or scene in your novel.

Instead, its an experiment.

Youre just testing a few possibilities for a first draft.

Heres a road map of the themes for each week:

Week 1: lists.

Lists are the creative minds best friend, Clare says.

Sometimes its easier to come up with a dozen ideas rather than just one.

Later in the course, youll pluck story elements from these lists.

Week 2: freewriting.

In this week you practice the skill of writingliterally anythinguntil time is up.

If you domorning pages, this is old news.

Clare keeps it interesting, though.

Week 3: mask work, or letting another persons words flow through you.

Its sort of like magic.

Week 4: style.

In this week youll write in different styles and from different perspectives.

Week 5: psych eval.

This one is about you and your brain.

Week 6: metaphors.

Youll get specific and creative about how you describe things.

Week 7: generating and fleshing out ideas.

By the end of this week, youll have the very rough outline of a novel.

Week 8: self-directed writing time.

You cant guilt yourself into writing, because distraction relieves that guilt more easily than writing does.

(Oof, I feel that one.)

(Clare recentlytweetedpages from his Bad Ideas Notebook.)

Youcanwrite without hating yourself.

And this podcast can help you do it.