Christopher Law's Week Three

A little stressed. A minor domestic crisis – my pre-payment gas meter broke – ballooned into an absurd drama that wiped out most my weekend. I'll spare you the details but the end result was I barely got any writing done and I'm now several days behind schedule. I've clawed quite a bit back this week, for which I need to thank coffee and cigarettes. Terrible habit, I know. This weekend should be entirely free, however, and I'm planning to surgically attach myself to the keyboard. I can still get this over the finish line if life will just stay out of my way! I'm also a little sad it's the last blog. It's been an added bit of fun to Nano this year.

Word count: 29432, as of quarter to eight in the evening on the twenty-first. About ten-thousand behind where I was expecting to be.

Last week you seemed concerned about your story not being at the right pace, not hitting the right tone (“[it] was getting a little too much like The O.C., or some other hideous teen drama”). Do you feel as though you’ve moved towards putting that right this week?

I'm glad to say that I have. The problem was that at the start of the story I wanted to portray the more normal parts of Maria's life – her boyfriend and other friends, all the things that Maria gets up to when Graham is away from home. I knew that section was going to be like that, although I should probably have used Skins as an example because that's more accurate. I was getting a little bogged down in establishing it all so I dropped a couple of scenes and amalgamated some others. That has meant I've had to make some of the bigger reveals about Maria's home life earlier than planned, and the plot overall has been considerably streamlined. I'm still following the basic outline I wrote but there's a lot of stuff that happened to other characters that's been cut. So far the cuts are turning out to be a good thing. The story's a lot snappier now.

Your biggest triumph this week:

Not succumbing to the defeatist despair on Monday morning after losing the whole weekend. Two or three thousand a day under normal circumstances is something I only achieve once or twice a week and I had a bit of a confidence crisis. I've been doing well so far this week though and hopefully my plan for the weekend will work out. Both the phones are getting turned off and I might unplug the internet as well so it should be a success.

And the bit that has made words harder to come by:

When I've been able to sit down and get working I've not really had any problems so far. Maria is one of those co-operative stories that wants to be written so it's all been flowing quite pleasantly. The part that has probably slowed me the most, however, is dialogue. I always find it a bit of a struggle and giving myself a bunch of teenagers to write for has made that a little harder than usual. I keep realising I've written something that just isn't believable and having to rewrite it. The story is set in 1994, when I was a teenager, but for the life of me I can't really remember how I spoke with my friends.

Talk to us about your ending. Are you excited to be writing it? Any final challenges to overcome? You hinted at the possibility of drastic changes being made to what was originally planned. Have things become clearer now?

I'm really looking forward to it. The whole story grew out of one part of the ending so I'll finally get to write the original idea. That's pretty cool. I don't want to give anything away but it isn't a particularly happy ending. If you remember I talked about not knowing if Maria was going to be a horror or a drama - the end is where the horror elements really come to the fore. The story is definitely clearer now. The changes I talked about before were all subplots about things happening in the lives of Maria's friends so losing them isn't really all that drastic. It has changed the time period of the story though. Originally events were going to unfold over a six month period which is now going to be about three or four months. The key events in Maria's life are all still there, it's just some of them now happen in slightly different ways.

Hopes for next week:

No more broken appliances! Hopefully by the time people are reading this I'll be back ahead of the word-count and the story will be into the final act.

NaNo in a nutshell (week three):

Horrid at the start but getting better. I still like Maria, which is also a good thing.

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