- Writing Time: 01:45
- Session Word Count: 1843
- Total Word Count: 42135 (40000 par)
On Day 7, I talked about how the middle of NaNoWriMo, like the middle of the book, tends to be the hardest part. Good news: the middle is over. We’re down to the final week. The finish line is in sight. If you’re participating and you’ve been struggling, don’t give up now. You’ve got this.
It’s also a good time to start thinking about what happens at the end of NaNoWriMo. Will you wrap up the story, or only finish the first 50,000 words? For my novel, I only expect to be about halfway done by the end of November. (And by “done,” I mean halfway through the plot, not through the actual writing process.) After November, I plan to write up some notes while they’re fresh in my mind, and set it aside to finish later—maybe during a different NaNoWriMo event.
At the end of this session, I left my characters swimming in cold water, in the fog, between islands that they’re not familiar with. One of my writing challenges is that I’m not very good at putting challenging obstacles in the way of my characters. My instinct is to set up problems that I know they can solve with the skills they have. I’m trying to remedy that. With my sketchy outline, that mostly means dropping the characters into bad situations, and then trying to figure out how they would get out of them in unexpected or interesting ways.
Tomorrow, I’m planning to get them to a new island, and maybe get to the point of revealing the antagonist that has been hinted at for most of the book, but not yet appeared.
Words Deferred 