Day 13 of JaNo – 2710 words today, 29129 total
I spent some time this morning thinking about what each of my characters wanted, which really helped with word flow today. It was much easier to come up with what the villain wanted than any of the other characters, and I think that may be why the scenes with the villain have been so much stronger while the other characters drifted about. Now that everyone knows what they want (or, more accurately, now that *I* know what all those characters want) things are moving along a bit better. Keeping the (often conflicting) goals of my characters in mind as I was writing today led to more tension between characters and better dialogue. Not that I’ve gone back to read it over and compare it to the previous stuff, of course, but my impression as I was writing it was that it seems to be working better now than it was before.
Since this is a practice novel, and I really want to practice writing not just beginnnings and middles, but also endings, I’m starting to worry more about the pacing and the overall structure of things. I sort of assumed, never having written anything longer than 8k-ish, that my problem would be ending too soon. Now I’m thinking that it will take a fair amount of effort to get things all wrapped up by the end of the month. And I’m not sure whether I really ought to push to have the novel end at (or around) 50k. Most novels are longer than that, so it seems a bit silly to push towards an ending prematurely, given that in all likelihood a ‘real’ novel would be longer. I’ll have to give that some more thought as I head into the second half of the month.
Decreased quota again tomorrow, because I’m going to a crit group session in the afternoon. Don’t want to let myself off too easy though, so I’ll pick 1.5k as my goal.
