I took a week long break of procrastination and now am in the full swing of things. I finally got my four main characters together and the introductory chapters all done. I’m about 8000 words in and need about 42,000 to complete it. Luckily it seems to be going fairly quickly now. So now it is time to talk about it, partially for your amusement and partially to get the characters crystalized in my mind a bit more.
I have four main characters in a light fantasy setting. When I talk about it to friends they say the premise seems like a cross between Pratchett and Aspirin (sp?). That is fine with me. It is meant to be a comedy basically.
My most normal character is a bard, 15 year old child prodigy, who falls for every red herring in the book and almost always misses the points of the stories being told to him. He has an Elven business manager who is obsessively clean and afraid of germs (my Elves are Keebler types of Elves… and a slave race due to angering the gods). And then he has hired two Dwarven bodyguards. They of course are gay lovers and really into scatalogical humor. Of course I made all Dwarves in my story “gay” because female Dwarves don’t exist which explains why people never see them in literature.
There is no real villain in the story since I don’t find villainous stories to be that interesting. The basic plot is that the bard loses his inspiriation and he goes on a fumbling quest to regain it. Of course since he falls for all the plot red herrings he misses the important things that happen. His patrons love his performances and think of his music as campy since the poetry always seems to miss the point.
Since I am on chapter seven now and talking about the reason why the Elves have been cursed I am not far into the story but I have plans for many other things to happen in this quest type of story. Since I am starting to get into it I think I will hit the 50,000 mark but am not completley sure since it should be close.
So what are you guys working on and do you think you will finish?
Interestingly enough, I am also working on a fantasy story. An Epic that doesn’t quite take itself serious, but no puns. Perhaps more satire or irony then anything else.
Unfortunatly, I have no hope of finishing it before the end of the month, due to a heavy classload. Given the choice between failing one or more classes and getting 50,000 words by the end of the month…
December should fare far better though. Oh well, I did it last year, so not getting a cirticate this year isn’t going to bother me much.
Lots of things have happened here in the past week, and I didn’t get anywhere NEAR the writing done I should have. We’re talking emotional distress and death, which doesn’t really put me in the mood to write. I doubt I’ll finish.
I’m doing a fantasy story too, but set more or less in “the real world.” However, I’m beginning to hate my story, which is why I’m only at 15,000 words.
It seemed like such a good idea before I started- a woman finds out that her listless child is actually a changeling, and that the fairytales are real after all - but I’m really bored of the story right now. I think it’s because the point I’m at now and where it needs to end are very murky in my mind and try as I might I haven’t figured a way to get from A to C, so I’m terribly uninspired.
Given that I’m over 1/4th of the way there, I intend to soldier on until the end of the month…if I don’t bore myself to death first. If anyone would like to attempt to give me encouragement or a clue as to where to go next, speak up and I’ll send it to you so you can be bored too.
I’m editing a 20,000 word roleplaying adventure right now, so I’m afraid I don’t have time to read anything else, but I can still give you some encouragement.
First, put a few blank spaces between where you’re at now and write another scene. It doesn’t have to be one that follows your current section. Just write something, whether it’s the ending or an interesting scene in the middle. The first book I wrote, I got stuck about 1/2 way through. So I wrote the ending. Then I had something to reach for, and the middle almost wrote itself. And when I reached the end, it changed quite drastically.
Second, brainstorming is the most magnificent writing activity you can do. Use an open Word doc, a whiteboard, a blank piece of paper, whatever. Write anything that comes to mind, regardless of what it is. Don’t worry how stupid it sounds. Eventually, something will start to form out of the mess. I once had to triple the length of an article I wrote for a magazine, and at first, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do it, because when I originally wrote it, it was as long as I thought it would be. But I did it, and they published it in its entirety.
Third, good luck. You’re further along in just two weeks than I was on that aforementioned 20,000 word adventure. That took me two months to write, and it was the fastest I’ve ever written a long piece.
I’m doomed as well. My story is so freaking depressing! And I’ve found that I have to put myself in the same emotional state as my main character if I want to write with any kind of realism, and lately I’ve been in too good a mood to want to do that to myself.
Plus, I’ve realized that in a couple of chapters, nothing happens. People have conversations, and that’s about it. Whoo, exciting.
6500 words in, and I want to quit. My prose is horrible, too. I figure, what’s the point of writing crap on purpose, just to meet an arbitrary deadline? It’s much better to take my time and write more slowly but more skillfully? Right? Right?
The purpose is, of course, to prove to yourself you can actually finish something really, really hard. For me, writing is rarely easy. My first two books took three years a piece to finish (I work really well under deadline, but not so good when someone isn’t expecting something). Just keep at it. It’s really worth it in the end to be able to say you’ve done it.
Last year I discovered that the trick was to Just Keep Writing. If I got stuck, I launched into a lump of exposition–the history of the space station, my main character’s favorite food, a random childhood memory, whatever, even if it didn’t have anything to do with what had been going on the paragraph before. I also found it helpful to say, “Okay, I don’t know where this scene is going, but what would she do in the next five minutes? Take a bath? Fix breakfast? Go shopping?” Whatever it was, whether or not it advanced the plot, that’s what I wrote about.
Now you’re saying to yourself, “what’s the point of that?” Well, the point is, you get words, and they’re all related to the novel somehow. And often just rummaging around like that manages to get you thinking about the story and I often find that a few thousand words like that can get me back on track. It makes for a sloppy first draft, but you can always fix it later–after November is over.
I don’t take the “writing crap on purpose” as actually trying to write crap. I take it as letting yourself write past the filters that are normally in place, the ones that won’t let anything past that doesn’t measure up to your standards of deathless prose. Chances are, a good percentage of what you think is crap really isn’t, and can be polished up later. But if you take years and years buffing the same four hundred words, where do you get? It becomes self-defeating, a way of avoiding actually producing anything.
I also find there’s an emotional component to writing–while I’m writing, everything sentence, every paragraph, every idea seems like genuine, bang-my-head-against-the-wall, I’d-rather-die-than-anyone-know-I’d-write-this-kind-of-garbage crap. Come back to it a month or two later, I’m better able to see just what it is I’ve written. Your judgment is impaired when you’re first writing that first draft, and if you depend on it you’ll end up scrapping everything, even the next Great American Novel.
The point of writing crap on purpose is to write something, anything. All first drafts are crap. Expecting a final draft out of your first draft, and an inflated self-criticism, keeps a lot of people from ever getting anywhere. Write the crap, put it away, and then come back and look at it–it’s probably nowhere near as bad as you think, and your judgement of what’s good or not in it will be better the more distance you have from it.
Elfikin, your story sounds wonderful we can trade what we have so far and read through it if you like. dorkusmalorkusmafia at yahoo dot com is my email. If you mail it post something here so I know that you’ve mailed it. If you want some suggestions on material to help cross from point A to C you will have to tell me what point C is in the email.
Anyway, everyone out there, I want to hear about your characters a little.
That’s a fair point, Bren_Cameron. I have to remind myself that it is far easier to edit something you’ve already written than to write something new. And writing anything is still good practice.
dorkusmalorkusmafia, my main character is 35-year-old woman, a writer and a teacher, living in New York. When she was a teenager, she was a self-styled bruiser queen, violent, angry, destructive towards herself and everyone else. One night, when she was 16, she got into an argument with her twin sister and shoved her out of their house and locked the door against her. Her sister was subsequently kidnapped, raped, and murdered. (Inspired by one of Paul Bernardo’s victims’ fate, just for the record.) The story is about how the main character deals with her guilt and grief over the course of her life. I’m really intrigued by the “I’ve changed and become a good person…waitaminute, the horror is still there inside me!” theme.
I’ve carried the character with me since I was 16, and I had always wanted to write about her story but felt it was impossible because there was no real inherent plot, since it was basically just a story of someone’s life. Even if I quit NaNoWriMo, the most important thing I’ve learned is the way to approach the story – I’m telling it out of chronological order so that the tension of the plot comes from the revelation of information, and not so much ‘live action.’
My character is a 29-year old guy who owns a comic/game store. He’s been a geek all his life and is starting to be tired of it, so he devises a plan to create a new, separate, non-geek identity for himself. When he (re-)meets Melissa, a girl sort of from his past, it seems to be a perfect escape. But what started as a simple plan becomes complicated, and he begins to question his questioning of his life.
That sounds really heavy gallows. I don’t think stories really need a plot exactly. For me a lot of them are about character relationships and any of the incidentals that happen along the way just go to reinforce them. I would love to be able to write a good character piece mystery but I don’t know what I would have to do to even get a good mystery off the ground. I love watching them on TV but rarely ever read them.
Maybe an anthropomorphic Scooby Doo with Elka and Giraphne would be more along the lines of something I would write. Well, until I realize that Furry Porn has ruined anthropomorphs forever. Teehee.
thanks.