Eleventh day. I have WORD open. I have about two hundred words typed out so far. I’m doing good. I got 17,201 words all counted out from my ‘Day 1’ to ‘Day 10’ files (I like to open a new word doc for every day to make sure I’m meeting my daily goal). I’m not behind. I’m not far ahead. I’m just slowly wandering down this woodsy path with no clue of where I’m going. This is bad.
I keep going back to when I wrote ‘Caspar and the Lunar Magic’. I was excited to write the beginning. I knew where the middle was. I knew how it ended. I paced myself. I made up conflicts that took me from one scene to the next. And then I was pretty proud of myself for having a whole adventure written out on the last day of November.
As I type the ‘sequel’ this time, I feel like I’m just doing a lot of babbling. I feel like the story is unfolding in such a boring way because I’m not sure what’s going on myself. I still don’t know what the middle of the story is and I don’t know how it ends. I keep expecting that as I feel my way through, a plot will jump right out of it all and say, “Here I am! Aren’t I just the perfect thing to explain all the crap your characters are mucking through right now?”
The last thing I want to do is write 50,000+ words of a story that sounds like a non-stop role playing session instead of an adventure that has a start and an end. I’ll never do a full outline and I do like the idea of coming up with stepping stones on the spot but if I have no idea what those stepping stones are leading me to, it feels like I’m standing in the middle of the woods with no visible clearing to get to.
This has definitely shown me that when I try “Coming of the Second Phoenix” for November of this year, I need to know the beginning, middle, end, and some major plots to push my main characters through.
Well, It’s just days shy of being halfway through the month. I have no choice but to keep wrestling this dragon and tame it.
Tags: NaNoWriMo
Location: The Green Room
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