NaNoWriMo: The Halfway Point
This morning’s word count: 31,265. Although I was distracted by a lot of non-writing stuff last week, I still managed to churn out a good bit of horror novel. Indeed, my creepy little fictional town was a welcome retreat from the real world.
Although a lot of seasoned NaNoers dread Week Two, I almost always hit the biggest speed bumps in Week Three. Every year I reach a point where I know what the ending of the novel will be, but have absolutely no idea how to get the characters from where they are in the story at the moment to where they need to be to set the end events in motion. And it’s a daunting, crummy feeling. I usually blunder through it, but I can definitely sense it coming on this year.
One of the hardest things about writing a horror novel is being able to come up with a reasonable answer to the question “WHY are these idiots sticking around when anyone with an ounce of common sense would have been running for the hills ages ago?”
My Inner Editor is being a right pain in the ass lately, I don’t mind telling you. Last night I realized that the current day in my novel must be at least 72 hours long given how many things I’ve had happen in that one day. This is definitely not a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey type of book where that sort of thing is possible. It’s been very hard to stop myself from going back and breaking that day up into more believable increments.
And on Monday afternoon as I was writing the day’s allotment, a very evil inner voice piped up:
“Say, Nicole, what do you think would happen if you killed your main character off right now? Nobody would see that coming since she’s been the POV character for so long, and it would give everyone a good shock. You could have her companion take over for the second half of the story. I mean, it worked for ‘Psycho,’ right?”
For now my MC gets to live; most of what I’ve plotted out involves her being alive for it, and I don’t feel like tearing all that up now when the finish line is starting to appear over the horizon. But during rewrites? We’ll see.
Hope everyone’s writing is going well. Happy Halfway-There Day to all the NaNoers.
