Blog Post #17

Done! All done! I have completed the last three exercises with one hour and 29 minutes to spare. Now to write about them.

The next exercise is about creating characters arcs for your secondary characters. Even if they die halfway through or leave the main narrative arc you should still know what path they take once they leave, or what would have happened to them if they survived.

This works on the same principle as plotting your antagonists storyline - it makes your overall plotline make more sense, and it fills in space in the storyline you might not otherwise have filled. I've now decided who is going to die in my story, based on their plotline - I didn't know that before. I've also come up with several other scenes for the main plotline which will (hopefully) make it more interesting, and expand the action a bit more.

Knowing their character arc also effects things like dialogue, which I was struggling with. Now I know what they might do or have done, I can understand better how they might react to a situation, and whether it would be important to them or not.

At some point I'm going to go through and create a timeline for all the events within the time-frame of the novel, just so I know what is going on at all times.

That will also involve the next exercise, which is about subplots. In this exercise you were supposed to take the subplots you came up with on day 11 (which for me was about three days ago?), and then think of how they could complicate the main plotline.

I actually already knew a lot of this already, just from all the other exercises I'd done. Some of it came up as recently as the plotting of the secondary characters' plotlines. That made the exercise pretty easy.

However, I did still have to come up with at least three ways in which these subplots could complicate the main storyline.

A lot of this is ground I already covered in the original post about subplots, so I won't go over it here. However, I will say that again this exercise has given my main plotline more depth. It also gave me a way to make a formerly boring characteristic of a character much more interesting.

That is the main point of subplots, really - to make the main plot more interesting. Also, the more complicated your main plot is, the longer your novel and the more you'll have to write about for NaNoWriMo. Can you tell I'm thinking about NaNoWriMo a lot now?

With that in mind, I'm just going to summarise the last exercise quickly. Then I'm going to sleep...

The last exercise is about comparing your characters to characters in published novels. The exercise asked you to do this for all your characters, but I don't actually have time, so I just did it for my main character.

This was actually an amazingly helpful exercise. I picked two books - Fairest by Gail Carson Levine and The Indigo Spell by Richelle Mead. Although the characters are not exactly like my lead, they do share some characteristics.

I read through some sections of dialogue, and then I practised writing my own. Even just reading through the dialogue and thinking about how it worked helped me a lot in improving my own dialogue. I guess that's the general lesson here, though - consciously thinking through how these techniques work will mean you think more consciously about your own writing and how it works. It also means you'll understand how these techniques function, and can hopefully apply them to your own writing.

Here's to hoping everything I've learned doesn't all go out the window when I'm frantically trying to make it to 50, 000 words in the last week of NaNoWriMo.

59 minutes to go...are you ready?