Whenever I'm not working on the Nanowrimo novel, it's defeating me. I can't see a way through it, the plotting seems simplistic, the characters badly sketched out, and, most crucially, I have no idea what I'm going to do to progress the story further. It's so easy to get a bit scared off, and run away. Gibbering. What tends to happen, however, is once I've managed to force myself in front of the computer, with the understanding that I really am going to write something, no matter about the fear that it could well be terrible. Writing without looking back is remarkably focussing to the narrative flow.
However, I'm saying that on what's essentially my last day off before returning to work. It's not really, I was doing the youth theatre yesterday, and I had my improv class tonight, but that's not like a full day at the office. It'll be interesting to see what I come up with - if I can come up with anything - after 8 hours of an exhausting job. My parameters of what's acceptable about the fear of writing something that's terrible may well have to be widened.
I've had a concern that while I know most of the events that occur in my novel, I don't really know why they're happening. There's not yet a logical catalyst to everything kicking off. Certain things have begun to slide into place today, but it's still doesn't quite make sense. I'm having to make. Y characters work against what they'd logially want to do in order to make the story work. That's not always a great way to work, but given the time constraints, I don't have much choice. Now, one of two things will happen: either my plot will simply snap, because it just doesn't want to go that way (which, despite what you might think, is actually a good thing, because it means that the characters are developing strong personalities), or that I will have forced myself to have thought of a good reason why my characters are doing things they don't want to do. In my downtime, I've been re-watching old episodes of 24, and quite often, Jack Bauer (or someone else) is acting under duress, being forced to act the the bad guy for a greater good. That's begun to stir things in my imagination as to why my main character is having to act the way she is. If nothing else, it's a good enough reason for me to claim that watching box sets comes under the banner of 'research'.
I'm hoping to hit the 10k mark before the weekend, well, ends. In the very strictest sense, that's not going to happen, because at the time of writing this sentence, it's about three minutes from midnight, but I'm going to play the Christmas Eve defence, and say that it's not Monday until I've slept. I figure I've got about a hour before fatigue takes me like a six foot mugger in an alleyway. My main stumbling block this week is going to be finding my 'macguffin'. While it isn't - and shouldn't be - the actual motor to the narrative - the way all the characters act will inevitably be influenced by whatever it is. But, bottom line: in the past four days, I've produced nearly 10,000 words more than I would have done otherwise. By the end of the week, I'll have more words in this story than are currently in my entire short story collection. And for that, I can only be grateful.
Nanowrimo Word Count: 9347
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