Old Faces, New Voices, New Directions

It makes me sad that, unless I decided to be crazy about it, there's no way I'll be able to continue my 21 posts a month streak that I've had going since September. I don't expect anybody else to really feel anything about that; it's not something that really matters, after all. It's just one of the little bits of symmetry that I appreciate when I notice it, and always makes me feel the tiniest bit crazy, when I do.

But December has not been a normal month, and so perhaps it's fitting that it won't be a normal count for December.

I should not expect to feel as I did during November. In November, this whole process was "NaNoWriMo," and it was a big, reckless, messy storm of thought and desire and a cavalier "damn-the-torpedoes" attitude. And when the goal, the only goal was 50,000 words in thirty days, it was enough. And it was fun. But now I'm approaching the second month of work on this thing, and it's no longer about reaching some word count. Now, it's about finishing a novel. In some ways, nothing has really changed, and yet, in others, it feels as though everything has. I want this story to be something now. I want the characters to take life, the plot to develop, I want it to succeed. I'm invested now, and that means, no matter how much I wish to go back to that carefree time I had in the beginning, I don't know that it's possible.

That's likely not a bad thing, though. The reckless time is fun, certainly, but it's not something that can be sustained forever, can it? At some point, we all have to grow up, mature a little, and realize that we can never go back, in writing or in life, or in anything, really. We can only move forward.

I did something different when I wrote today; took the story in a completely new direction, and I'm not talking about doing something weird with the characters, like I did yesterday. I mean, today, I took my story which has so far been a first-person narrative the entire 34 or so chapters and 70,000ish words, and introduced a completely new narrator. It's a character that's been in the story from the very beginning. And it's a character that I never even considered making into a narrator, until I found myself wondering more and more about her. What her story was. Who she was, not just in how she related herself to the protagonist.

When I looked at the place where I had originally written "the end," I wondered that, if the story wasn't over, if I shouldn't perhaps shift things a bit. Move the focus for a while, so that we can have the feeling of resolution even as I take things elsewhere for a time before I bring the focus back to my lead character.

I'm excited by the possibilities. I'm terrified, as well.

I don't know where the story will go, although to be honest, I don't think I ever did. I haven't really had a plan from the very beginning, it's just been about these characters and following them as they go off and do their things, and hope that I can record it all in a way that will make sense to other people. Does this new character have a story to tell? I believe that she does, and I think that, just as my protagonist has grown from her original inspiration as a single line (a line which has sort of become the synopsis for my story so far), this character, too, has evolved and grown and changed into something new and exciting. There's a story for this new character, and in some ways, it's the original protagonist's story told from the other side, from a new perspective... and it's also something entirely new.

It's a chance for me to zoom out, to show that there's a much larger world than the one that exists on the page so far. It's a chance to explore.

As I said yesterday, it could be dangerous.

It could also be very exciting and extremely rewarding, and I think it would be a terrible mistake if I did not at least try.

It also makes me very glad that I'm a writer and not a director. I'd imagine this sort of thing would be dangerous to do with your lead actor.