NaNo Week Three

Chugging along.

This week I'm really starting to notice that this draft is awful. 

It needs another draft to be even with my usual first drafts.  It's like a preme baby draft or a uncooked cookie dough draft.

This means I'm doing NaNo correctly!

The main things that I'm shoving onto the back burner, noting that I need to suck it up for now and deal with them in January are the characterization and the world building.  This is boggling, because in my self-evaluation I rank myself pretty high on those.

I blame my outline.  It's not that I don't know how characters are feeling, it's that I'm not writing it.  The only reason I can figure that I'm doing this is that I didn't write it in my outline.  The outline focuses on events (with the rare frowny face thrown in), so--with my current MO of checking my outline and writing what it says for 20 minutes--I'm missing out on...everything but plot.  There's no racing heartbeat.

Now, I needed to know how the characters were feeling to make my outline.  In fact, I re-outlined the end a few times making sure the stresses would build enough to break my main character.  I have post-it to-do lists stuck to the folder that holds my outline that have check boxes like "angry enough?" and "Keep <side character>'s attitude consistent."  Just for some reason notes about the character's emotions didn't make it into the outline.  Maybe I didn't think I needed to spell them out.

Since I know what everyone's feeling, I can insert that into a second draft.  Plot is usually where I struggle, so going into the next draft with that skeleton already in place is going to be a huge relief.  I can read through and note where the story is missing heart, where it needs to be flushed out.

The world building problem comes from the fact that this is several stories squished together.  When I removed the main threads from the old stories, they dragged other remnants along with them, like when you pull a weed up by the roots to find clumps of dirt snagged with it.  Now that I'm getting deeper into the story, those remnants are coming to light, and some of them are contradicting each other.  The big example is the state of magic in the world at large.  In one old story, everyone knew about it.  In another of the old stories, the magical world was a secret, underground community.  So now, in this story, how do people react when magic happens in front of them on the street?  Do they panic?  Are they intrigued?  Are they annoyed?  This needs to get answered and these disparate stores need to meld together completely, or this endeavor is destined to fail.

I'm not going to let that happen.  So the world building will need another hard look (or several hard looks).