Tag: nanowrimo

Finish Line Fever

Nanowrimo is over. You’ve won, or maybe you’ve almost won. There are no losers here. Everyone gets a trophy. Or you know, the idea of a trophy. You have a novel, that’s trophy enough.

But wait, there’s more.

After the writing comes two or three rounds of editing, spaced around more writing. You have to make sure all of your scenes work, make sure all of your characters are consistent. You have to cross all of your t’s and dot your lower case j’s.

After the editing comes the proofing, checking your story for style and grammar. Reading into, around, between, and through the lines to make sure you’re actually saying what you think you meant to write. read more

Working the Payoff

Every story eventually comes to a conclusion, it’s the writer’s job to make sure that conclusion satisfies both the needs of the story and the desires of the reader. The story needs a conclusion that ties up all of the loose plot threads and ensures that every character has been through a complete arc. These technical details are important to the reader, but only at the basic level. The reader knows they are important to the story, but he is much less interested in the fact that the conclusion to every plot point and character arc exists than in how that point is concluded. The reader doesn’t just want a conclusion to the story; the reader wants a satisfying payoff. read more

Loose Threads

As the main story draws to a close, the writer faces the unenviable task of gathering up the loose ends of the plot and character arcs and tieing them neatly together. As your novel draws to a close, the reader wants to feel a sense of completion, like he’s not missing any parts of the story. The writer needs to identify plot hoots and character points, making sure that each of them is resolved. In a perfect novel, the two will work together to form a single inevitable conclusion.

When the reader looks for the hallmarks of a completed novel, he’s not worried so much about having every single detail of every single event. The reader’s imagination will fill in many of the points left out by the writer, creating a sense of involvement and investiture in the story. The reader is concerned about picking up dropped plot and character hooks; the writer should be concerned with identifying those dropped hooks and carefully extracting them. read more

Nanowrimo Checkpoint 2

The end is in sight; don’t quit now! Writing a novel inside of a month is a challenging task. Maybe you’ve had some false starts. Maybe you’ve missed a few days worth of word count. (I’ve missed a few on the blog, and I’m not trying for novel-length word count.) The holidays make things more complicated. Work schedules increase without regard to what I’d actually rather be doing. Chances are, if it’s happened to me then you’ve had some of the same challenges.

The good news? The end of your novel is fast approaching. Those words are mounting up faster than you thought possible. You may be cruising to a climactic resolution like a warm summer breeze. The words might be leaking with increased difficulty. Nanowrimo is a marathon, and you’re an endurance athelete. read more

Changing Shoes

The writer of a novel must be able to effectively portray a broad range of characters, differentiating between how they speak, how they act, and how they think. Some of these, perhaps most of these, will necessarily be of a type utterly foreign to the natural mindset of the writer. The writer has many tools with which to portray characters; one of the most common and effective involves assuming the role of a central POV character during a scene.

Assuming a POV role allows the writer to get personal with not only the character portrayal and reaction, but also the perception of the scene. Getting into a character’s shoes affords the writer access to his thoughts and the ability to share those thoughts and motivations with the reader. The reader gets to be up close and personal with the character, understanding how the character perceives the world around him and empathizing with the character’s reactions. The writer gets to explore the character’s motivations and discover how those motivations interact with the larger world of the story. This technique both advances the growth of the character during the story and increases the emotional investment of the reader. read more

Chasing the Plot Wagon

Storytelling games such as computer and pen-and-paper role playing games (RPGs) rely on a story structure that funnels the characters along a single line of action. The characters must go to this inn, must speak to this barkeep, and must slay this dragon before the action can progress any farther. This tendency is occasionally disparagingly known as the “plot wagon”, or a means to get the characters from one plot point to another without diverging or chasing rabbit trails along the way. It makes for streamlined storytelling, but can seem very contrived if not handled correctly. read more

Pep Talk

Nanowrimo is more than half-way gone! Your novel has more than half of its total word count on the page. By now, the burst of energy that carried you through the sprint from the starting line has faded into a long, grueling marathon. Fear not, the second wind is coming. Soldier on! Write as if you mean it! Before you realize what’s happening, you’ll be in love with your story again and your characters will be springing from your fingertips onto the printed page. Pep talk’s over. It’s been a long weekend here, and it’s not over yet!nano read more

Cashing the Reality Check

By now some sharp-eyed reader has checked in on the blog and noticed a day is missing. “Hey,” this reader is saying, “Where’s my daily dose of writing insights? Where’s my daily encouragement during Nanowrimo? Where’s my cheese sandwich?” Through the magic of blogging I could engage in time manipulation, go back to yesterday and insert the post into the matrix as if nothing happened. But that’s not reality. Reality is that things don’t always go as planned, and no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. read more

The Slave of Duty

Internal conflict within the plot comes from diametrically opposing forces influencing a character’s choices. These forces are: what the character desires to do, what others desire the character to do, what is morally right to do, and the action ultimately taken. In a perfect, conflict-free world all of these choices would be identical and characters would make the right choices every time. This might lead to a harmonious world, but it makes for pretty poor drama. Drama results from the effort to bring these forces into alignment. read more

Climbing the Plot Tree

Conflict drives the action in your story and makes the reader care about your characters, their failures, and their triumphs. Your plot may be thought of as a tree. The characters are trying to reach the top of the tree. Conflict determines which branches they climb on the way to the top. Conflict in a story comes from two sources, internal and external.

Internal conflict originates from within a character. It stems from the decisions he makes and how he feels about his choices. A character’s internal conflict drives him to choose one course of action over another. Internal conflict causes a character to choose different branches of the plot tree based on how he feels about following that course. Branches may be chosen because they look more stable and attractive, or because of the view they offer of the landscape. Internal conflict causes characters to climb the plot tree while focusing on themselves, how choices will affect them personally, and what things seem more attractive at any given time. This character is less concerned with getting to the top of the tree than with carefully choosing his own path. read more