November goals check in...and something cool!

[dorihbutler]

I'm a little past the halfway point of the month. My goals were 1) to complete a draft of my YA murder mystery and 2) to lose 5 pounds. I'm on track with my word count (29,421 words!) and I've lost 2 pounds

Comments

[ext_218722]

That's more than cool - that's a sign that your process is working, whether it feels like it or not.

Since NaNoWriMo works primarily as a way to break through the inhibitions ordinary people have against putting their butt into the chair and writing, there's no shame in dropping out of it. It sounds like you're taking a story that's still mostly in the preconscious working-it-out stage and arbitrarily yanking unripe bits into consciousness every day. If that helps you figure out more about how your process works, and which bits of your process are process and which are crutch or self-limitation, more power to it.

My middles are always like that. And in the current work I started out with chapter breaks, First Second Third, and then I came to the transitional middle chapter that had to consist mostly of exposition and moving all the characters into the places they needed to be, and it's clearly too long and will have to be broken up or cut or changed around in unpredictable ways, so now when I get to what I feel like is probably a chapter break I put in ??th Chapter and keep going. Into the unknown, because this part of what had been a pretty meticulous plot outline is mostly a list of payoffs and I have no idea how they fit together.

I bet Shakespeare had fits over the middle part of Midsummer Night's Dream, too.

[dorihbutler]

That's comforting! (Both the fact that your middles are "always like that" AND the idea that perhaps Shakespeare had trouble with the middle of Midsummer Night's Dream)

Are your middles always like that even when you're writing a mystery? Seems to me in a mystery we shouldn't have to worry about the sagging middle because we're chasing down clues. Things are happening...well, they SHOULD be. I realized in my story things were happening to other people more than they were happening to my main character. So I had to rethink...

[ext_218722]

Yeah, mysteries too. Maybe if you're writing a puzzle mystery that's all interlocking parts and perfect timing you get to skip the middle blues, but the thing about clues is, in the "real life" they're mostly accidental and can be missed or interpreted wrongly, so they don't lay down a linear path through the book. Because of the direction I work from, I have to figure out what the offstage people who leave the clues did and are doing, which means understanding their motivations, and figure out how that intersects with what the protagonist is thinking and doing, and how this skews her perception of the clues. Having two sets of characters overlapping in time and space but functioning separately can create a lot of sprawl; especially when the timing doesn't slot together perfectly.

There's a sense in which all stories are mysteries, anyway. So the rules of mystery writing can't be that different from the rules of writing anything else.