NaNo Update and the Creative Side

Four days in and I’m up to 30,000 new words.  It’s been an interesting four days.  Two 6,000 word days (weekdays), and 8,000 word Saturday and a 10,000 word Sunday.  My outline has been torn to shreds.  Well, not completely torn to shreds, but around the 20% mark, the story took an unexpected turn.  Now there is a new character, who is more interesting and will now have a greater impact in the overall story arc than I had originally imagined.  This takes the book from heroic fantasy to epic fantasy… a bigger scope.  So we’ll have to see what happens, especially in the the 50-75% area of the book where I think I was going to run out of gas.  Now I have to plan for another element to the book and the implications for the ending now has much higher stakes.

The unfortunate thing is that I killed off a character much earlier than I thought I would, but this new character will substitute and make the story stronger.

I consider myself more of an outliner than a ‘pantser’, but sometimes you have to go what’s coming out of your fingers.  When that happens,  writing actually becomes more fun, but at the same time, for me, more challenging since I still have to turn the story around back to the basic ‘bones’ of the story in order get the story where you want it to end up.

Now we’ll see how I do next week.  I should eclipse the 50K minimum Thursday or Friday.