The story of my WIP, Larger than Life, is slowly revealing itself to me. It seems that each week I better understand my protagonist and can better envision him not only in plot-forwarding situations but in how he will behave in those situations. I make my copious notes when I’m away from my laptop, and I manage to transcribe them and even put some of them into fresh words when I’m before it. I managed to put down more than 2,000 fresh words in a recent writing session, which I consider highly productive (for me) but probably not sustainable on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve mentioned here a few times that I really have no use for NaNoWriMo as a tool. (I’m happy if it works for others, though.) I can see from my process that it would not work for me. The reason is that I am discovering my story as I write it. While The Sleep of Reason (still no news) is predominantly plot and tone based, Larger than Life is mostly character based. I am getting to know my characters at a measured and thoughtful pace that I don’t think would work under a month-long, artificially imposed word count system. If all I were doing was writing a plot-based story, maybe I could see some value in NaNoWriMo (again, for me). Or if all I wanted was to get the bare bones of a story’s plot in place in a hurry, that process might work for me. But I would have to have the plot mostly fully realized in my head before the month began in order to work productively under such high pressure (for me). This is how I happened to write my recent short story, “Diaspora.” But as I said, I had the plot nearly fully worked out for that one, and it is a short story, not a novel.
The point of all of this babbling is that Larger than Life continues to gain critical mass and momentum (if I may mix a metaphor), and I know I will finish writing it. (There had been some doubt. I have other projects I really want to get going, but I can’t do two such things at once.) It may be the novel I had to get “out of the way” or it may turn out to be a finished work. Either way, I’m getting there.