Doldrums

Oh my. February was a long time ago. The intervening months have included a lot of distractions and a huge dip in my motivation. I keep plotting and re-plotting and finding new things to be dissatisfied with. I keep shuffling nodes around in Freemind, which is a balm to my guilty conscience, but doesn't result in any real work getting done.

For a while I even toyed with the idea of skipping the coming-of-age part of my story and moving straight into the more interesting sequel. I find myself constantly comparing my work to other books, and I get really hung up on trying to avoid stepping into what I see as other people's territory. A coming of age story involving magic? Watch out for Harry Potter cliches! A story where religious authority is the enemy of intellectual freedom? Don't rehash The Golden Compass! An urban setting peopled by decadent nobles? Watch out, you might write Sword's Point! And like a shadow over all hangs The Name of the Wind.

So I'm working through all that.

In personal news, this summer brings a change of setting. DM and I have abandoned Long Island for the moment, and are subletting an apartment in Berkeley until early August. It's so wonderful to be around our friends again, and to be able to eat the food we like! I've been taking pictures of the food, in fact. Here are some examples.

Pizza at the Cheeseboard!



Delicious fresh vegetables!



Mexican food at Cancun!!



Cupcakes at Love at First Bite!



Samosas at Vik's!



Mysterious candied fruit confection...at Vik's!



OK GO! at Maker Faire! (Ok, I know, this isn't food. But still!)



And this doesn't even include Gregoire, or when my mom took us to lunch at Chez Panisse. Oh dang. I love this place.

Day 11: Ups and Downs

Wordcount: 19003
Minimum: 18964

I didn't post yesterday, but I was on target (wordcount 17279, minimum 17240).

Yesterday the writing passed with amazing ease; I think I broke 800 words per hour. My secret? More rehashing of the earlier plot via a discussion between characters! It wasn't even gratuitous. Today I had to actually move on to the next plot point, which was slower going, although still not bad.

I think I'm having trouble with the pacing in this story. Considering I'm writing it with so little planning, this is not altogether surprising. I feel like I put a big exciting event too early in the story, and now I have to keep topping it with more and more exciting things. The upshot of this is that the ideas I had for minor encounters are not getting used.

I'm encountering a rather odd problem with the story I have chosen. So much of the magical nature of the fairytale landscape depends on the sentience of things: deer, birds, trees, fish, the wind. I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with encounters that don't involve something unexpectedly talking to my adventurers. In this environment, it rapidly becomes unbelievable that they would not simply start expecting plants and animals to talk to them. I haven't really come up with any other sorts of encounters other than dangerous beasts (which I am saving for later), and of course meeting native "tribes". What else can I include to show the fantastic nature of the landscape?

The natives are causing me a different problem. I wanted them to have kind of the feel of Tolkienian elves, except more hostile and dangerous (or at least unpredictable and alien). I've also been reluctant to make them too culturally advanced--they are still pretty primitive. So the problem with all this is that they are looking more and more like a thinly veiled (and somewhat offensive) representation of Native Americans. It turns out that if you keep nature-focused mysticism, and subtract the trappings of civilization, you end up with Noble Savages. Plus they're white. This isn't the direction I intended to go at all. I think I will need to re-write these encounters extensively.

Writing the blog entry has actually given me some ideas. I had so far been thinking of the Nymean Wilds as essentially a wilderness, inhabited only by "primitive" peoples. Maybe the fantasy element would actually come through stronger if there are cities and towers and libraries and so on. That would certainly be a shock to my explorers!

Day Four: Learning Curve

Wordcount: 7512 (and counting)
Target: 6896

I'm in Berkeley now. After a delicious "waffle special" at Fatapple's, I spent the morning writing in the North Reading Room of Doe Library. The North Reading Room is so lovely--why didn't I spend more time there as a student? It's a high, vaulted room lit by ample windows and skylights. The reading tables are beautiful old oaken monstrosities, with chairs to match, and on each table are several foliate brass reading lamps, each with electrical outlets built into its base. Now I'm in a cafe with a couple of medievalists, hard at work. Well, I'm mostly hard at work, but now that I've made today's wordcount (with some words to spare, thank you), I feel justified in cruising the NaNo forums a bit, and of course posting here, which is for some reason much easier than writing a novel.

For today's featured topic, I'd like to talk about my difficulties. What's so hard about writing a novel? I can only answer for myself, but here are a couple of problems that I'm struggling with:

First and foremost, there is the obvious problem of plot. Thinking ahead, building up the path that moves the narrative logically yet suspensefully from introduction to climax, is difficult. I'm not saying this doesn't get easier with practice, but it is hard work. It just is. And when this isn't working, it creates the most difficult kind of block to work past. It makes it very hard to say anything at all.

Then there's the problem of managing dialogue. My biggest problem with dialogue is making it serve the rest of the story. My characters start talking to each other, and before you know it I find that I've forgotten where this little speech was going. Or, worse, they've said what needed to be said, but now they're trapped in a conversation that has to come to a natural end. In real life, conversations go on. There are few situations in which a conversation between normal people ends with, "well, that's all I needed to say. Goodbye." But in a story, you can't just let them stand there telling each other about what's going on with them. You have to come up with interruptions so that they can shut up and you can get on with the story.

These aren't my only problems by a long shot, but they are the only ones I have time to talk about right now. One of my guys has just done a very stupid thing, and they are about to get in really big trouble.