Novel Dare – Day 4

Good, but tentative progress. I’m up to a not startling 2,543 words total (which means I’ve added about 1500 so far today), but I’ve used those words to explore three of the four main characters of the book. Two of them I have down pretty well, and the third is about half-and-half fleshed in–maybe 75%. The fourth I know I need, but haven’t really addressed yet. I’m also tiptoeing around the central premise of the entire environment that the story is set under, and that will drive its soul in the end.

My guess is that finishing my initial cut at the fourth main character will knock over the final big-picture barrier I’ve got, and then the rest of my problems will be “simple” plot structure. Perhaps then I’ll even have a title, eh? This whole process really reeks of some work I did to prepare for a discussion at the Bartholomew County Writer’s Conference, whereupon (whenupon?) I ran into Stephen King’s commentary that the first draft of any book is really about finding out what that story is really about. I can feel that in my work the past few days. I understand the base environment I’m fiddling with, and I’m slowly hitting on issues that environment causes. And in that process I’m settling on the things this means for each of the four characters.

This is pretty fun for me. It’s like solving a puzzle. It’s consuming that way, really. I could be happy sitting down here in the basement all day playing with the problems I’m creating and seeing how the people I’m thinking about would react to them. This isn’t really work at all. It’s enjoyable to just kind of drop all the other things going on at any one time and just focus on a few words here and there, and think about situations from these people’s points of view.

Anyway, at present I’m feeling pretty good.

I’m calling it a morning, though. I’ll zip off for lunch and a trip to the health club. Perhaps when I get back I’ll be ready to take on Character #4, eh?