Well, as I pass the 75% mark of my novel and start realizing the need to wind down the story and tie up all my plot and such I also realized that I need to write down some of the things I discovered along the way. It would be a waste to go through all this, have a bad 50,000 word novel, and forgotten all of what I learned up to now. So here’s a brief list of some of the stuff I thought about while I was writing.
-50,000 Words really isn’t that much, especially if you have a lot of characters you want to describe.
-It would have helped a lot if I had known all the major conflicts I wanted to put in so that I could story board them ahead of time.
-I find my characters magically progressing through the plot rather than experiencing any interpersonal conflicts that would make it interesting. I kind of pretend like they happened anyway and write about what I wanted to have happened later on.
-I think it’s better to introduce most of the characters fairly early, only 1 or 2 to come in later. I just didn’t get a chance to really flesh them out so they end up just being tag-a-longs.
-I have no idea what a subplot is.
-My characters need more motivation for their weird actions, I’m having to figure that out as I go and it doesn’t always seem genuine.
-A running tab of the characters and their background info would be a useful reference sheet so I wouldn’t have to scout back through and see what I wrote 20,000 words prior.
-Consistency would have been good, I think I lacked that when I drastically changed the way my protagonist acted without much of a clear catalyst. Dynamics are fine if they make sense…
