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Sep. 3rd, 2011
Pardon my rambling
Sep. 3rd, 2011 08:28 pmSo as you might have assumed from my previous post, I've picked up my NaNoWriMo 2010 story for the first time since, well, November 2010. I hit 50,000 words a few days early and came to a screeching halt, and haven't really had the guts to look at it closely since. See, it was my first ever NaNo win, and while writing it I even thought it was fairly decent, and I was afraid to look at it again and find out that it belonged on the scrap heap. I glanced over it a few times, tightened up the prose here and there, cut out section that, now that I wasn't worried about a word count, were obviously stupid, but always stopped short of continuing the story.
Until last night/today. Perhaps confronted with the necessity of cleaning my house this weekend, my brain and muse went into overdrive. While I technically still haven't written the scene where I stalled out at 50,001 words (why do I keep inventing worlds where people use swords? Swordfights are hard to write!) I have a vague idea of where my characters are going, which is great since before I had no idea at all.
The problem is that while I have protagonists, possible ship (of course), a handful of countries with their own geography, religion, and culture, backstory, etc, my villain is pretty meh at this point. Sure she's responsible for a lot of bad stuff in the past, some of which the reader knows, but the POV characters don't which makes her a pretty poor villain. The only other bad guy in the story (actual bad guy as opposed to annoying dude or dudette) was dead prior to Chapter One. I've always been a firm believer that a story needs some kind of peril to be really interesting, and right now my characters are all pretty much in stasis. My protagonists have worries, and a mystery to solve, but due to circumstances they aren't really in a position to play Sherlock Holmes.
I suppose I should trust in the lessons of NaNo: that if I don't think about it too much I can write a lot of words that don't suck. And we'll take it from there.
Until last night/today. Perhaps confronted with the necessity of cleaning my house this weekend, my brain and muse went into overdrive. While I technically still haven't written the scene where I stalled out at 50,001 words (why do I keep inventing worlds where people use swords? Swordfights are hard to write!) I have a vague idea of where my characters are going, which is great since before I had no idea at all.
The problem is that while I have protagonists, possible ship (of course), a handful of countries with their own geography, religion, and culture, backstory, etc, my villain is pretty meh at this point. Sure she's responsible for a lot of bad stuff in the past, some of which the reader knows, but the POV characters don't which makes her a pretty poor villain. The only other bad guy in the story (actual bad guy as opposed to annoying dude or dudette) was dead prior to Chapter One. I've always been a firm believer that a story needs some kind of peril to be really interesting, and right now my characters are all pretty much in stasis. My protagonists have worries, and a mystery to solve, but due to circumstances they aren't really in a position to play Sherlock Holmes.
I suppose I should trust in the lessons of NaNo: that if I don't think about it too much I can write a lot of words that don't suck. And we'll take it from there.
