Category: Writing

The issues with bringing lone characters into fairy land for the first time are multiplying. On the other hand, I’m in fairy land now, and dealing primarily with a new type of creature, which has made things slightly easier. Back on that first hand, though: This character in on a completely different emotional journey than the reader is. The character is like “oh, fuck, fairy land is hella weird,” but the readers are getting used to fairy land by now, and to them these new wolf monsters are a new threat in a location that has otherwise begun to be familiar. Particularly, the viewpoint character of the last arc absolutely thrashed a large number of (small, weak, and cowardly, but still) hostile fairies. Fairy land can bleed. It can’t only be thwarted by exploiting specific magical weaknesses like in the first arc, you can also just walk up and stab it in the face if you’re badass enough.

If I had set this up properly, the characters would be in contact with one another between expeditions to fairy land, or else all traveling through fairy land together. Either way, they would know what other characters had been through by default, and would only be unaware of what other characters had learned about fairy land if they were still in danger and hadn’t had time to swap stories. This way, protagonist #3 might not have personally faced all the dangers of fairy land that 1 and 2 have, but just like the reader she knows what they are and will only be surprised to see the new threats.

Alternatively, I could’ve set things up so that each character had a noticeably different reaction to fairy land, but that was also more planning ahead than anything but the first arc got. Instead, protagonist #3’s reaction is mostly just a cross-section of protagonist #1 and protagonist #2’s reactions. #1 entered with trepidation but also determination, because she wanted what she’d came for even though the place frightened her, and intended to steal what she came for. #2 entered not just determined but Hellbent on achieving her goal. She didn’t just want to get the thing she came for, she wanted to prove she could go and get it by force. #1 takes in fairy land fearfully. #2 glosses over her journey and only starts focusing when she gets close to her destination and begins to plan her attack.

#3 is here for recon purposes because she’s trying to find #2, who was stranded in fairy land by injuries as the result of her bullrush on hostile redcaps and now no one back in mundane town knows what’s become of her. #1 presumes she is dead and refuses to help anyone else enter fairy land because she’s afraid they’ll end up dead too. That was real compelling for the one argument, but didn’t pan out long term. Now #3 has got into fairy land anyway, alone, and she’s an uninteresting middle ground between #1’s fear barely overcome by her greed and #2’s zealous pride.

By highlighting what few differences exist, this might all seem fairly interesting. The problem is, there’s too much in common to stretch these things out for a full paragraph or two, and yet the characters need that paragraph or two in order to have a reaction to fairy land. It makes perfect sense for protagonist 1 or 2 to be all “and then she walked back through the fairy forest again” because they’ve been there before and throwing out a one line scene transition is fine. Protagonist #3 has never been here before. She needs to react, but because I didn’t really plan these characters or the plot out past the first arc, her reaction comes across as kinda dull because dear God, it’s the third time someone’s been to fairy land and been like “whoa, the moon’s super bright and the animals talk.”

Now I’ve got past that, though, and I’ve got protags 2 and 3 talking to each other, there’s a timeskip there where 2 can plausibly inform 3 of everything she’s learned about fairy land (which encompasses most of what protag 1 learned about fairy land, even if we did have to watch protag 2 learn it again), and the story is now primarily dealing with a new threat. Getting into fairy land and the initial reaction to fairy land have been reruns and I don’t even know how to rewrite around that without completely rewriting the whole thing (which I may at some point do), but now I’m freed of the constraints of my own lore, I can focus on the things that actually make this character unique instead of being constrained to the things that she has in common with the people who’ve already done this.

Ultimate progress report for the day is 40,032 words out of 41,667. If I can keep up 3k words per day tomorrow, I will only be a few hundred words behind quota with four days left to make that up. I think I just might pull this off.

So if I’m going to do this 3k per day thing, I’m clearly going to need to put more effort into it. I’ve gotten to 36,451 out of 40,000. I’m still putting today’s goal at 40,000, as I’m only a few hundred words behind on my 3k per day goal. I am facing a consistent problem: I tend to like things just fine once I’ve gotten my characters out of their mundane origin world and into the fantastic fairy world. I even like that they’re from a mundane origin world, since exploring and experimenting with the fantastic other world is part of what I’m writing and I like that. Unfortunately, my first arc was written with the assumption that bouncing back and forth between fairy land and the mundane world would be frequent, and thus I put no effort into positioning my characters to be pushed into fairy land and then stay there for a long period of time. Rather the opposite, I gave them mundane attachments to compel them to keep coming back.

The problem here is, I do not really care about the mundane world at all. There’s nothing to recommend it over fairy land. The story would be better if all my characters were dumped in fairy land and stayed there. I could spend more time exploring fairy land rather than being constantly nailed to the area immediately around the gateway. In all three arcs so far the characters’ initial goal is to find the same house, but each one is walking that path for the first time. It’s weird to gloss over it completely, but it’s also really dull to write three different very similar reactions to crossing over. Structurally, each arc was plotted out independent of the others and it shows.

The different characters have almost fully distinct adventures and rarely encounter one another, which means I cannot contrast someone’s second visit to fairy land with the new viewpoint character’s first. The cast of the complete story is growing, but the cast of individual arcs is going in circles. The first arc had six characters with major speaking roles: The protagonist, her friend, the guy who gets her into fairy land for his own purposes, the guy who obliges to her help that last guy out, her hobgoblin guide in fairy land, and the primary villain. Almost every scene had the protagonist interacting with one of these people. So far, so good. The second arc was from the viewpoint of the first protagonist’s friend and introduced a third friend, but then the new protagonist spent her time in fairy land completely alone with an entirely new fairy land guide, an alfar unrelated to the hobgoblin. Well and good that she has her own fairy friend, but the lack of interaction between herself and the original protagonist, the alfar and the hobgoblin, the alfar and the original protagonist, etc. etc. means that we’re still just watching one character walk around and interact with other people one by one. We get to see the new protagonist interact with the same villain as the old one did, and there’s even a nice contrast between how they handle the situation and how the villain reacts to them, but again, there is no interaction between the two protagonists to help sell this.

I knew about this problem in the second arc, but because I wasn’t thinking ahead when I wrapped it up, I left the second protagonist in the middle of fairy land and badly wounded. Consequences are great, but this means she isn’t going anywhere for days, and that’s if I give decide to give her super rapid healing on account of the fairy bandages she’s wrapped up her wounds with. In the meantime, my new third protagonist has to have her adventures completely alone again. We’ve been around fairy land. We know what it’s like. “Hey, look at fairy land” could sustain the first arc (barely, since there was hardly enough interesting detail there to go on), but it can’t sustain three when I’m constantly peeking into the same tiny section of it. It’s a forest with one house in it and juuuuust enough new wildlife to keep me from going mad with boredom.

Ultimately, I think the problem here is that it is well and truly November. It’s not just that I’m writing in November anymore, it’s that the outline I’m working from came from the thick of November, and the characters came from November. I’ve run out of scraps of better stories to recycle and am now running on fumes. My newest protagonist is a selfish jerk with few redeeming qualities (though I would be terribly unsurprised if she wound up being the favorite of the three if I end up posting these stories somewhere, just because her one talent is making excuses why things aren’t her fault and people are depressingly vulnerable to that), she’s going to meet some pretty uninspiring new monsters, and ultimately the only thing about the whole outline is that 1) it’s going to put protagonists 1 and 2 in a tight spot by the end and 2) it’s all I’ve got, and only complete stories count for NaNoWriMo, so if I don’t bring this arc to a close, I have to delete the whole thing. Current goal: Wrap this up fast and go back to writing with the targeting computer off, because clearly the Empire is jamming my systems. I might not have the slightest idea where that one scene was going, but it was easier to write.

So through a combination of miscalculating the word goal yesterday and it being Thanksgiving and thus barely getting anything done, I am now extremely behind, 34,396 of 38,334, and will undoubtedly need more than 2k words per day to catch up. The good news is that producing 4k words in a day is something I’ve done before and can do again, and doing that twice in a row will have me caught up. Even writing just 3k per day will have me caught up in just three days, so 3k daily is now the goal. I have an outline all written out again so that should expedite things.

My brief experiment with writing on impulse yesterday has mainly reassured me that what I thought earlier was true: I can sustain discovery writing for about 10,000 words and then it becomes so aimless as to be completely useless. Also, it tends to lead to entire scenes that probably don’t even need to exist. I wrote a thrilling escape scene, except if I were to expand that into an entire story, I would probably end up cutting that escape scene, since the entirety of its impact on what might eventually be the plot is to strand some characters in the middle of a jungle where the actual plot occurs. I did not really figure out what the central conflict of one of my characters was until near the end, have not figured out what the central conflict of the other is at all (though I have some ideas), and I’m not certain the character relations were actually very well thought through. I plotted them all out from scratch in just a few hours.

Whole thing got me to 33,827 out of 35,000, which is still badly behind but at least isn’t falling any more behind. I also think I have a proper outline just about sorted and still enough time left to catch up at 2k words a day (barely!), so we’ll see how this goes.

I spent most of today looking for a third arc and realized I’d written myself into a corner. I had two viewpoint characters, neither of whom I immediately wanted to give a second arc to, and then a few others who could only be promoted to viewpoint characters if I found some way to get them involved in the story. The problem was, the story’s actual plot was both secret and hard to access. I got through the first bit of the outline for my third arc revolving around a secondary character who was going to be promoted to viewpoint protagonist, and then realized that I was basically just copying my second arc with only some tiny tweaks. I tried promoting one of the only characters who already had full and regular access to the actual plot to viewpoint character, but it didn’t take long into the outline for that before I realized that he didn’t really have anything to do with all these characters.

And this is the point when I realized that I had written myself into a corner. Bringing new characters into the plot was too difficult. Old characters had already resolved an arc and didn’t have anywhere to go without further monumental upheaval. And I was constantly haunted by the fact that I’d really only created enough characters to serve the outline that lasted me only for my first 12,000-ish words, and that honestly I’m not super thrilled by any setting in which I cannot give my characters a submachine gun.

I wrestled with the idea of starting a completely new and different plot for a while, one that would be detached from the two biggest stumbling blocks of this one: Very few characters had a motivation to get involved with any kind of actual plot, and the plot was hard to reach which meant characters needed a powerful motivation to get there. Ultimately, with just a few hours left in the day, I took the characters I had sketched out, decided to forego finishing the actual plot outline (I really only had a very basic concept, and that selected largely on auto-pilot), stuck the characters on a hostile spaceship, and told them to get off of it before I killed them.

I’ve gotten to 32,473 out of 35,000 with this method. We’ll see if it pans out long term.

I keep slipping further behind. Word count for today is 31,016 of 33,334. I can still make this up, but it is more than one full day behind and I’m beginning to reach the limits of what I can make up by just writing 2k daily until November 30th. The good news is that I have been able to write more than 2k fairly reliably in the past. The bad news is that I’m still kind of fumbling around to figure out what my third arc is going to be.

Wordcount for today is 30,697 of 31,667, although once again by the time I even got around to writing this blog post I’d already got it up to 31,089. Here’s the problem: I’ve run out of outline again. I mean, I haven’t really arrived at a specific ending point yet, but this story is out of momentum and it needs a new arc to get anywhere. I might have another, like, 300 words until I reach the actual ending line, but that’s not even going to get me up to day 19’s goal, let alone day 20’s, and I’m going to have to spend some/all of day 20 outlining a new section.

Another one of those days where I kept writing a ways after midnight, so my word count for the day is not the same as the word count when I stopped writing and went to sleep. Today’s word count is technically 27,252 out of 30,000, a significant deficit and then some, but by the time I went to sleep it was up to 29,288, close enough that I’m hoping to catch up tomorrow. Not only is this not the first time I’ve said that, though, this isn’t even the first time I’ve noticed that this isn’t the first time I’ve said that. Particularly, the day in which nothing got done wasn’t even all that eventful – I just got distracted with a completely different project (one that may show up on this blog after November).

No progress today. At all. First time that’s happened, the one time I was at least able to throw in like eight words by adding some titles. I’ve got enough time left to absorb this blow, I just have to avoid making a habit of it, and the bright side is that I did spend the day working on a bunch of other stuff.

I’m pretty sure I made my word quota and then some if you count all the writing I did unrelated to my actual novel, and some people do count literally any word of fiction written during November as part of their 50,000 total. Seeing as how my primary motivation here is just to keep being productive in a month that’s typically been fallow for me, I could probably justify taking that approach. It doesn’t feel right, though, and since the goal is arbitrary, I’ve decided to stick to 50,000 words written for the specific story I started on November 1st. By that metric, I’m at 25,938 of 26,667. Behind, but I should be able to catch up in a day or two. My primary worry is that if I have one of these lag behind days right before the end, and it takes me 2-3 days to catch up, well, I won’t have 2-3 days. I should try to build up a buffer to guard against this.