Two weeks ago I hit a wall with my WIP. If you count back, that would have been the fifth of November, give or take a day or two. At the time, I threatened to stop writing and pick up a brand new project, even though November had already started.
A month and a half ago, I had a brilliant flash of inpsiration for a story I’ve been wanting to write for years. I knew how to tell it. I knew the plot, I’ve known the characters for forever, and I decided to ditch my SNI in favor of an old, comfortable favorite. But at the time I said if motivation hit, I might end up writing both novels in November. I know, 100k words. Insane, right? *looks at those two people specifically who have higher than 50K goals for the month* *winks*
So for the last two weeks I’ve been hating old comfortable. The characters I love are…too intelligent to make an interesting story. They know things before they happen. They know everyone else’s motivations. They can predict what happens next and relocate themselves to intercept it. Sure, sometimes Ace misses the fact that someone is about to off the current one and only true love of his life, but for the most part, he’s the perceptive, apathetic, arrogant ass I created him to be.
Without Lexi, he’s really rather boring. She’s the only person who can keep him continuously off-balance. Who can keep him from seeing through my antagonists fairly complicated webs and keep him from stopping them. Problem is, with the new plot she doesn’t appear until the fourth quarter of the story. Which was my brilliant plot idea. So…I need to replot the story again.
And that’s why…I’m thinking about breaking like the #1 rule of NaNoWriMo. If you wonder why I’m not just giving up, it’s about the personal goal at this point. Part of me really needs to finish a project. So I’m taking a break from Apathy’s Hero for the weekend. I’m writing the first little bit of Contagion instead. If things keep moving the way they have been with SNI (Contagion), then I’ll be very very happy. I started at 4:45 this morning (couldn’t sleep). I’m at 4,000 words less than four hours later.
So, we’ll see. Have you broken any WIP rules? Self-editing, starting over, something else? Or do you think the entire concept of ‘rules’ in November is just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of? ^_^
I did! I started my book over on day 4 because I realized I’d started my story way too early. But I have re-used almost half of that early stuff I wrote. Plus, I promised to write in sequence this time through, which I don’t usually do, but I cheated on that I wrote a whole 6K chunk toward the end about 10 days ago….
Yeah. I’m bad.
I thought that what I wrote on the original NaNo WIP was all going to be trashed, but this morning I realized I’ll still be able to use 90% of it when I get back to it.
But this new shiny…it’s being kind to me. I’ve learned that if your characters are either stupid or arrogant, it’s easy to get them to do things that require thought to get out of ^_^
I stopped writing, does that count? I do minor self-edits during nanowrimo and I don’t do contractions which is kind of funny because I posted using contractions as a tip on twitter. But in my writing I can’t help but put “it’s” instead of “it is” and things like that.
*winks* I’ve already decided to go for 75k instead of 100k.
I’m glad I never have that sort of problem. Sure, my characters “know” what’s going to happen in the entire series but they don’t control or stop anything. They do what I write and only surprise me with small information i never considered before that moment of typing.