Saturday, September 19, 2009

The Long and Short of It

Yay! I've just hit the 10,000 word mark for my contest word count. Boudreau's still in the lead, but I'm staying ahead of Deb and Jenny, (until they read this, get fired up, and blow by me).

Today is also interesting for the sake of where I am in the Cass book. For a while, I've been thinking I was at a certain point in the plot, a point that I figured was about half way. But, as I've been doing the contest, having to keep up the pace made me rethink. Basically, I was thinking how certain other things needed to happen before I got going on the final show-down, except I couldn't figure out what those other things were. All I could think of was that I needed more "stuff" because I needed more pages before the big fight. Getting stuck on figuring out that "stuff" brought up a question that I might not have asked myself if I had lots of time to ponder and come up with "stuff." That question: "But, why?"

What's the purpose of waiting? Yeah, the fight itself is going to be kind of short, but there's still plenty of lead up to the fight. Characters need to do certain things, a certain set of actions need to happen. So, why not jump right in? I had an "aha!" moment, which was cool. The biggest problem I was having was second guessing myself - I've started a couple of novels, and even gotten to the end of the middle of one, but this is the first one I'm getting to the end of, and I was worried I was doing it wrong. Bah. Enough of that. Right now is the part where I just write it. Later, if it turns out I actually do need more stuff, I can add it in. It's a very freeing thought.

This morning, I deleted a couple of paragraphs of "stuff" so that instead of spacing out certain events, they were happening on top of each other. It's a lot more fun to write this way.

Okay, back to writing, it's time to beat the tar out of some characters.

1 comment:

Debbie said...

Good for you! Sounds like you pushed through at exactly the place where I got stuck. Keep going.