I have a confession. Although I signed up for Write-A-Go-Go with all the best intentions, I’ve only written about 1500 words in the past two weeks, and only 500 of those have been on my NaNoWriMo project, which is the one I’m trying to focus on.
Sigh.
If I may explain a bit… I hit 50,000 words in the last couple of days of November, and coincidentally, during a scene in which one of the main characters of my novel (an urban fantasy) was killed by the villain. I had been planing on killing off this particular character all along, but ended up really liking her, and not wanting to see her die. I know, I know, writers need to be able to kill their darlings. My problem was that I just simply lost interest in the story without her, because of the three main characters, she had become the most sympathetic one. Furthermore, by that point, the story had become a tangled mess, and I felt like I’d just lost my grasp on it all. So I didn’t touch it for several months.
The 500 words I’ve written for Write-A-Go-Go were a re-imagining of that scene, in which she doesn’t die, and while it feels more right, the rest of the story remains tangled and out of my control. But I love this story. I love the world, I think the characters are really interesting and well developed, and I think it’s got a lot of potential buried in it. I don’t want to give it up. I just don’t quite know how to get back into it.
All right. I think writing all this out has actually helped–I’m feeling better about my novel now. I think I’m going to spend some time brainstorming ways to get my characters from here to the end of the novel, create a new outline, and get back on the horse and keep writing.
Good luck with the replotting! If you’ve got this far along, you must have a good plot going, getting to 50k isn’t easy.