My NaNoWriMo - Week 2!

I've been away doing lots of great things at my internship so this post is way overdue!

Week 2 of my NaNoWriMo experience was the hardest of all the weeks in November. I was so far behind the word count by the time the second week came hurtling towards me that I began to question how smart I had been for beginning so late in the game.

In truth, pride was the only thing that kept me from giving up and deciding that this whole thing was simply too much trouble and that I could always start again next year on November 1st.

Once I had (re)committed myself to the project, I began to think about the overall plot and how I would start the novel. I always start at the beginning whenever I write a novel and then write whatever comes into my head with the idea of filling in the rest later on when I know how to join things together. It's a messy method on the surface but there is order to it, and it works for me.

Writing a Crime/Thriller novel for the first time ever was going to be a difficult task. Funnily enough, the name of my protagonist was the hardest of all I had to come up with. I tentatively settled on a name with a mind to change it later (at this point, any name was good enough with me. I would have named her Bob if I had to).

In short, P (no surname) was a detective trying to unravel the mystery surrounding her husband's death. It sounds super simple but there is a lot more to it, and as it is still a work in progress, sharing it on here would not be great until I have decided on the ending 100%. I might share bits and pieces of it on here at a later time.

The problem I ran into in this second week of furious writing was P. I needed to construct a character who had been through a life-changing ordeal. Since this event happens at the beginning of the book, I ran into a lot of difficulty portraying her as a character who is devastated by her the loss of her husband. The difficult was not just in this but in how to communicate the gravity of her loss to the reader.

As a reader, I must have been drawn towards that part of my task and decided that it was more to focus on the reader and then building on P so that I she would eventually have more layers to her.

I was wrong to do this, however.

I quickly came to realise that P came across as cold and totally unrelateable. Of course, I have read books in which it is the author's intention to make the main character unrelateable to the reader but this was not what I intended. In fact, my vision for the novel was for the reader to empathise with P.

This was not the case and, midway through the second week, I was running out of ideas on how I was going to move into the main part of the novel. By this time, I also had to admit that I had a protagonist I did not particularly like. She was two-dimensional, cold, hard, and I really did not care for her at all.

The guys who give advice on NaNoWriMo advise participants to write and to continue and push through these difficult periods and not to change their novel at any point. I did not want to do that but I knew that there needed to be some compromise on my part if I was to complete the 50,000 word count by the end of the month.

So I did so and was astounded by how much easier things became. I switched to the genre I was comfortable using - Fantasy, and began to write. The sense of renewed inspiration and optimism I felt was something I had not been expecting and I began to write.

Simply switching my characters from humans to werewolves (I have an intense love of werewolves that I cannot begin to describe, and I'm damn proud of it) made my writing so much more pleasurable.

The first sign that I had made the right decision in choosing to switch genres was the way in which P's name changed so effortlessly to the character I will call 'F'. Although F was emotionally the same as P at the beginning of this new novel, I found that it was easier for me to develop a main character with whom it was easier to understand her emotional state. It was incredible how the simplest change of genre could reinvigorate a novel that was failing before it had even really begun.

I suppose that a lot of my difficulty may have been due to the fact that I was broaching into unknown territory by writing a Crime novel. I have no doubt that much of my inability to break through to the main body of my original draft was due to the Crime genre I had originally chosen. The fact that the fog seemed to clear once I switched to Fantasy only reaffirms this. By day 14, I had caught up with the word count and was feeling happy and renewed about the rest of my NaNoWriMo experience.

Expected NaNo Word Count at end of Week 2: 23,333
My Word Count: 23,555

-read Week 1 of my NaNo experience here!