Tomorrow marks a full week of NaNo and for me, it has been full of surprises. I spent the month of October planning and re-planning; plotting and re-plotting my Work in Progress, entitled “Dark Healing”. Now I have been working on this WIP for two years and I just keep getting stuck. I love characters, especially my hot hero Quinn Kamdyn, but it just doesn’t feel right to keep writing it. I have started and finished this particular WIP three times with brand new twists and turns.
I had been excited to finish the outline on Halloween, but then when it came to start writing on November 1st, I was blocked. No words came from my fingertips and I couldn’t seem to formulate a sentence in my brain. Frustrated, I put on some music, but it still didn’t open anything up for me. I keep a soundtrack on iTunes for each of the stories that I’m working on. It helps me get into character as I listen to music that I feel that my character would like or that he would identify with.
The song “Broken” by Lifehouse came on and it was the song that I pegged to describe one of my old characters, Charlie Maranzano. Charlie is an Italian boy that was raised in the slums and saves the lives of one of the mafia heads’ children, befriends the son and falls in love with the daughter. Through a tough childhood, Charlie rises with the help of his friends to become that mafia head. It’s not the Godfather as it is heavily a romance. It’s kind of a Charlie’s Angels meets the Godfather, if I needed to nail it down to a particular mini blurb.
I had been writing it three years ago, when one of my instructors told me to stop wasting my time because there was no market for it. I listened and turned my writing focus to another of my loves, paranormal, but every now and then, I long to return to good ol’ Charlie.
Just for an experiment, I opened a new document of Scrivener and tried to write. Well the words just flowed and I couldn’t stop. Three thousand words later, I realized that I needed to write Charlie’s story. Quinn’s can wait.
I went back into my files and discovered my original outline for my mafia romance. It needed some major work as I have learned so much in the last three years, but whenever I seem to touch the keyboard for “NaNo time”, I just type away the morning. I flew through the first 10,000 words and while I still have a lot to go, I feel confident that I can finish.
Good luck to all of you that are doing NaNo. It’s going to be a bumpy ride!
RJ :)
2 comments:
Sometimes you have to write what needs to be written. I like writing vampire stories. I love my vampires. I'm writing a ghost story now and it has taken me awhile to get into it (which I am now), but when I talk about writing the next vampire book my mind wants me to write, my husband thinks I shouldn't bother - vampire stories aren't selling (or so he assumes since I can't get an agent based on my vampires). I just don't know how to tell him I can only write what I can write. It's too hard to force something else.
Congrats on 10K words and good luck on finishing, which I'm sure you will if you love the story as much as you say.
Good luck with NaNo. I too had one like yours that nagged at me all the time, but had been rejected a few years ago. So, I had set it aside.
This past year, I picked it back up again, totally revamped it, and now it will be published in December.
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