NaNo – Day 10.98 – Momentum

As the last minutes of day 10 tick away, I inch ever closer to the halfway point.  I hereby vow to hit it tomorrow!

I wrote on and off for a lot of hours today, all the time making very little headway.  It was the scene.  I’ll likely cut some of it to smooth things along since it kind of goes an odd direction with one character.  It was slow because I knew it wasn’t working.  Still, I refused to edit.  I powered through and hit the next chapter.  And wow did I pick up speed.  I think I wrote over 1000 words in my last 20 minutes at the local write-in.  It was actually a scene that was slated for an earlier chapter but just didn’t fit there, so I opened that PoV character’s next chapter with it (the one I was writing today) and the whole conversation just slid out like I was pushing the handle on my daughter’s Play-Doh Fun Factory.  I actually expected this character’s scenes to be more tedious due to less action.  I was wrong.

Truth be told, I don’t like writing action sequences.  Sometimes they come quickly, sometimes they don’t, but I get tired of the repetitive writing of who was doing what, who was standing where, whose hand was where when they grabbed for the sword.  Tedious detail that is either important or later cut.  With two-person dialog, character names thin out.  If I close person A’s quotes, the next quote starts person B.  Every few exchanges we need a beat or a tag to remind us we’re on track.  One thing leads to another and bap-bap-bap you’ve revealed a lot of information while developing characters.

Alas, a lot of action comes at the end of this chapter, the kind that is very unusual and cannot be glossed over.  While it’s nothing like it content wise, I always think of The Matrix when I write the kind of action that’s coming up.  The characters do things that are so other-worldly that you need to slow things down to make sure all the details are recognized.

Anyway, it’s day 11.02 now, so I’ll turn in for the night.  Good luck to all you wrimos.