It was weird posting Sunday. I never do it. I hadn’t done it in ages, mainly because the best time for blogging is at work, to make the most of those usually wasted eight hours. But I guess it was a special occasion being so pumped at writing so much, and so consistently.
I hadn’t blogged so far this week though, mainly because, honestly, I was waiting for people to comment on my odd flash fiction piece and my recent post.
But of course NaNoWriMo is bearing closer, and I need to work the plot for Hadeon out in full. I don’t want to start writing on November 1 not having thought out the whole thing because what if I work out something that could happen later on that needs some change of the plot at the beginning so that it works? Too much fiddling around and rewriting for my liking.
As I said in my last post, I’m mulling over what actually happens in the climax. It’s hard and I finally found some help, offered by someone in a writer’s forum I’m a member of. I emailed her my whole plot worked out thus far and am waiting for a response. Even the act of writing it all out like that helped and gave me a push in thinking for myself.
I need to work out what the characters are looking to resolve by this point in the story and in order to do that I need to flesh out my subplot regarding the new town he moves into and a female character he meets. I’m well on my way to doing that. Suddenly last night I totally changed this character and her relationship to the main character as I flesh out her backstory with some of the other people in the town.
She’s no longer the love interest of my main character, as too often female secondary characters end up, and she’s a far more deeper, more complex and interesting character now. In a sense, she plays a role in changing my main character’s own perception of women and personal relationships which should help to resolve what happened to his own relationship at the start of the story. Hopefully this will give me more to play with to put towards the ending.
In the course of this, some half decent possible endings came to me and I jotted them into the back of my notebook.
Do your endings come naturally? Do you have to plan them? If so, how do you work them out?
writing, NaNoWriMo, Hadeon, endings, plot
It’s good to hear that you’re writing. That’s excellent news.
My stories are usually built around the endings. Not always, but generally speaking. I think it’s important to know how your story ends so that you can work towards it confidently.
I have worked stories around endings before, but this one was built around a beginning premise.
I think it’s definitely true that once I worked how it will end, the middle bit leading to the climax will become far clearer.
With my novels and even with my scripts, I usually come up with one core moment, it’s not always an ending, it’s not even a beginning most of the time, but I like to get that core idea written out and then spider diagram off of that all other scenes. So I suppose, you could say, I start in the middle a lot of the time.
Great blog by the way, found it through BlogMad and it’s definitely going in my favourites.
All the best,
Steve.
Steven, I work very much the same, a core element, but usually for me it’s a beginning. I begin with a situation and try to get people out of it.
Good to see someone from BlogMad. Didn’t even know I was still getting traffic from there. I’ll be sure to check out your blog when I get home from work.
I always have an idea of how I want the story to end before I begin – but in a very basic sense, e.g. knowing the protagonists will win, knowing whether or not they’ll fall in love, that kind of thing.
By the time I’m on the third chapter or so, I usually know who’s going to die to achieve that ending, what the protagonists have to sacrifice. And I start imagining scenes at the end – for instance, with the current WIP, I know the hero is going to save his companions’ lives, but at the moment when he thinks he’s finally going to receive their admiration, a horrible thing he did in his past is revealed. That’s going to be fun to write.
Found your blog through AW, by the way, and will read through it.