NaNoWriMo Day 6 - 12,127 words

[thewhitelily]

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew.
        -- Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

The night before last, I was pretty happy to find a villain. Last night, I found the rest of my story.

It's day seven, I'm a quarter of the way through, and instead of hitting Week Two Blues, I seem to have mainlined the entire Orion supply of Perky Juice.

It all started when my villain from the previous night finally met up with my protagonist and, rather than genteelly pushing her off a cliff, he started making annoyingly unspecific threats, and when I tried to make him get more specific I realised...

Everything. It was one of those intense explosions of clarity, the kind of ecstatic flash of plot coalescence that should be familiar to any NaNoWriMoer who has started without anything resembling a plot and ended the month with a novel, where I could see the whole story laid out in front of me, spreading out in all directions, complete with motivations, reasons, themes, context, and overwhelming potential.

... and then he pushed her off the cliff.

If I'd been taking a bath when it happened, I would have been halfway down the street shrieking Eureka! before I even realised it. As it was, I contented myself with dancing and running around the house screaming wordlessly, fully clothed, and spending the rest of the night visiting my sister as a fidgety wreck, with the whole thing in my head, desperate to get back to my story.

I now have a quest for my protagonist, which falls naturally into three sub-goals before she can acheive her main goal. I have the potential for the villain to throw any number of bizarre encounters or random obstacles in her path, if these sub-goals don't provide enough material along the way. I have an entire virtual fantasy world originally created by a little girl, which gives me the freedom to (a) mock any cliche that I want to as well as (b) use it anyway. I have an intelligent, cruel, motivated villain who is thoroughly enjoying himself in the role of a lifetime. I have the development and resolution of physical, personal, and relationship conflicts faced by the protagonist all rolled into one coherent story. I even have a map.

And it's all just there in my brain, bubbling away at increasing pressures and straining to gush out of my fingers the moment I sit down in front of a Word document.

Why do I do NaNoWriMo?

Hah.