The NaNoWriMo Experience

The Great NaNoWriMo Experience

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Week Two & Three:



Why am I lumping weeks two and three together? Mostly because I suffer from short term memory lost. While I remember the things that happened during NaNoWriMo, I forget when they happened, which day and at what time. If I was a good girl and blogged about NaNoWriMo while it was going on, or kept some sort of record, I might even be able to give a daily update. But since I have waited nearly a month, I can only give a basic summery.

Unlike most people, it seems, week two was great. Week one felt like an introduction to me, but in week two it felt like I began to write the "real" story, and week three was a prolonging of this. I was becoming better acquainted with the characters and learning to love them, even the unsavory ones. The plot moved along at a crisp pace and always added detail to the world I was making. I no longer felt like the plot was simply a means to introduce my un-fleshed out characters, but rather an exciting adventure brought on by the personal and human like decisions of my characters.

While I am kind of on the subject, I would like to address the following. Would I view my novel as plot-driven, or character-driven? I honestly do not know. I would like to imagine both, in a way. I have tried to make the plot exciting and full of twist, but often times such a plot causes the characters to lose some tangibility. This is due to the fact that much of the time in the novel is dedicated to the plot, putting as much in the novel as possible. Instead of going deeper into the character, another twist is added to the plot. Then again, I also spent much time fleshing out my characters, making them seem real and personal. Not flat character so I can do whatever I want to do with the plot without fearing it makes my character act, well, out of character. I have tried to my best to make detailed characters and make the plot so that they only do the things they would do if real people. I am not sure if I succeeded in this, I feel I did, to a certain extant at least, but being the author, I am probably not the best judge in the world. Not only do I know things about the characters that might not be conveyed to the reader, but making up an uninteresting plot can still be interesting and fun.

Anyway, back to NaNoWriMo. Like I said earlier, my characters were becoming real people to me. Do not get me wrong, that are a couple inconsistencies in a few of my characters, mainly Clara and Fritz, but I already know where many of the inconsistencies lie, and what I can do to smooth them out.

Odd to think, but most of the inconsistencies are with the two main characters. At first I thought that strange. Why would the characters I spent the most time fleshing out and working with have the most inconsistencies? With some thought, I realized the fact I worked with them so often was the very reason why they were inconsistent sometimes. The more detailed a character becomes, the more personal they become, the easier it is to make them say or do something outside their character. Flat character can do pretty much anything and since the reader, (and author sometimes) does not really know the characters personality, they cannot really say if that was out of character or not.

There is one other specific character I would like to address David, which is the name of the Nutcracker. (I mostly gave him a name so I would not have to call him the Nutcracker throughout the entire book. Unfortunately, I could not come up with a good name for the mouse king, so I called him King Mouse. I am still trying to find a name for him.) At first I had quite a bit of trouble with David. He was really the only character I went into the book without really knowing his personality. I feared that he was going to be one of the characters that I like to call, "abruptly-changing -flat-characters." It basically happens when a character is not all that detailed, but seems to hop from one extreme to the other, with no real rhyme or reason. Even for a character you give very little information about, extreme hopping makes the character seem unrealistic anyway.

As I went along in the novel, I would come up with an idea, a small event, or something David would say, or a way I could describe him, that would make him more 3D, and less like he was extreme hopping. Then I would give him something else. A motive for what he was doing, or a situation that would make his seemingly inconsistent behavior consistent. By the end of the book, my worst fear became my greatest triumph. Was David perfect? Probably not. Was he the most improved? Definitely. I might be able to change a thing here and there to make him more congruent, but really he is one of the few major characters I feel the freedom to leave as he is.

One of the funnest, (most fun ;) things about writing is the last minutes additions or changes. As well as David, I did this quite a bit with the plot. David and the plot are probably both on top of the list of last minutes addition and changes done to them. The general idea I had for the plot did not change that much, and I often did not stray too far from the plot out-line I had written before November, but many of the details in the scenes were radically different than I intended. There is even a minor character I suddenly made a major character. Mostly because I loved the personality which I had given him on the spot when he first came into the story. I was constantly adding and taking away scenes, causing them to be enacted differently, even though the ended with the same result. Sudden inspiration is what makes novel writing seem like an adventure. Honestly, if I knew every little detail before writing a novel, I would not have much fun with it. It would be a bit like reading a detailed out line to a book before reading it. It would still be fun, but half the fun, (for me at least) would be gone.

So with the characters and the plot well on their way to becoming nearly complete and well formed, week two and three closed with an excited wave goodbye that would bring me back during week four.