Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It wasn’t a good first week for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but progress, albeit modest, was made.

I suspect my challenges are the same as many of yours:

• I have a job that requires a large chunk of my day
• I have a partner with whom I enjoy spending time
• I have a household that requires periodic attention
• I have a body that requires food, sleep, and exercise

In addition, this week I also had a very busy social weekend—a very unusual situation—including an outing to see a movie with others and (gasp!) an event I hosted at home (quelle horreur!) On top of all that, I also have coursework for my new job that I need to complete by November 10th.

But all of those problems are logistical, and logistics can be managed. The real challenge proved to be the novel itself, and the condition in which I’d left it.

When I finally did sit down with my novel-in-progress, I spent a day just going over what I’d written before. The book has languished for a handful of months, untouched, unconsidered, and all I remembered about where I’d left it was this: I wasn’t happy. Going over the last chapter I’d written confirmed this fact.

The narrative is at a crucial point in the internal action for the female lead. I knew what she was heading into and what her reaction would be, but her mood was just too bright for the coming darkness. At the chapter’s current pace and progress, it was going to require a hard turn to get her reactions in line to where she needed to be.

Hard turns in plots are anathema. A hard turn means I’m using a crowbar to make the story fit the outline. A hard turn is something readers pick up on, too. I hate it when I read one, and I bet you do, as well. Hard turns mean something is ill-wrought and they smack of authorial laziness. Think deus ex machina and you’ll get what I mean.

I considered restructuring what came before, but that’s too much like editing and I didn’t want to edit at this point. For me, editing is death to new writing; I just get further and further into revision-mode and it can take me weeks to get back into creative-mode. So, I reminded myself that (say it with me) all first drafts are crap, I made some in-line <notes> about possible restructuring, and I plowed ahead and tried to write myself out of it.

As I’ve mentioned before, writing a wholly character-driven storyline is much harder for me than writing an action/event-driven one, and this is a perfect example of why. It all has to come from within the character and, being new to this form, the solutions I’ve used in other forms don’t always work. I have to experiment with solutions as I go.

Pen to paper, I faced the issue: my female lead was in the wrong state of mind. OK. Now what? Maybe she realizes she’s not taking things seriously. Maybe she sees that she’s avoiding the important issues in front of her. OK, let’s go with that. What next?

This experiment seemed to work. I followed my character through her emotions, drew on her background to discover the self-revelation that lay beneath the surface, and let her feel everything that came with it, including the cognitive dissonance of denying/accepting her own epiphany. It was rather fascinating, and at the end I had five steno-pages of longhand prose to add to the chapter.

Not great for a week’s worth, but as they ask in curling, “Is it better than it was?”

It is.

Onward.

k