Writing in Public, Too: NaNoWriMo Day 14

Did some writing in the early afternoon today, and then off to work. I managed to finish the episode, which is awesome. And it didn\’t end either where I thought it would or how I thought it would – which is always an interesting experience.It\’s an odd thing about writing.
Sometimes, you can know precisely how a story will end long before you reach it. Sometimes, you have no idea just how it will end, and keep writing until you finally find an end point.In general, with serial fiction, I like to plot fairly tightly, then allow some flex as I do the actual writing. That\’s because I want to keep the stories between 10-15k words, for this serial, and because every story should have a specific arc, and further the overall series arc as well.

This episode didn\’t end how I expected it to. I thought the hero was going to do one thing: there\’s a child in jeopardy, and Arthur has a chance to save her. And I expected him to save her by tossing her to another major character. I even researched it the throw to make sure it was possible. But no, that\’s not how it turned out. As I was writing, my brain began to consider how the next episode would be if he did that, vs doing something else. And I decided there was an opportunity to raise the stakes, and create more emotional tension by doing something different.

Then the story didn\’t end quite where I expected, either. I closed it off about fifteen minutes of story-time earlier. So there\’s still a lot going on, when the next episode picks up. The characters are still in immediate danger – it\’s not resolved at all. It\’s a true cliffhanger, which is unusual for this series. But at 14,700 words already, it was going to take another couple thousand words to resolve. It seemed to make more sense to cut it here, and launch in the middle of things for the next segment of the story.

Which I\’ll be working on writing as quickly as possible! 🙂

Fiction words for the day: 1000      Fiction words for November: 15,500

Blog Words today:: 365     Blog Words for November: 5826