As I'm trudging along on my NaNo journey, I am fighting very hard against my internal editor telling me my story is crap and I should trash it (which is the reason I've failed for the past three years). The main thing its whining about is the fact that my story is pretty standard.
Serial killer, agents racing against time to catch him, long nights and hard boiled detectives drinking coffee, organized crime ring with lots of Italians planning a Columbian drug deal - it just feels too predictable.
Of course, I have a lot of original elements too that my inner editor is ignoring - the group of people in police custody in a basement apartment, the magician that uses smoke and mirrors to rob banks for the organized crime group, etc.
I'm not really asking much of anything, just kind of wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing over here. =)
Any suggestions for spicing our novels up?
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The Magician With Mob Connections
A magician is taken into protective police custody after receiving a death threat from a notorious serial killer, while he is in the midst of planning an elaborate bank robbery with an organized crime ring.
4,133 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2007 - 16 12
You write about a serial killer.If you want to write on you first victim has to your inner judge that tells you your writing shit. kill him. it´s the only way to write a novel in a month. and you have to kill him often. you have to be a serial killer. I have killed my inner judge thousand times and he is still living. somedays he is dead. and sometimes he wake up efter a few minutes.
Just let go and go and go and turn up the music, that´s what I do. It helps.
Good Luck
Wordhunter
12,327 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2007 - 16 19
My recommendation would be to take a risk.
Take a character you randomly threw in the plot for a page or so and bring him/her back in. You could turn that character into a main part of the plot.
If that fails. Take someone you know and throw their personality into a character just passing by and perhaps begin to have them appear often and become a part of the plot.
Another suggestion would be to throw something in that no one would expect to happen. Kill off the main character, have a character get amnesia. It doesn't matter what it is as long as it takes your plot into another direction.
BUT ABOVE ALL. DO NOT DELETE WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN.
Right now, I'm not really experiencing the problem yet because my story is a bit odd. My main character is a man who once being laughed at for his science works is a drunken mess. His daughter enters his life and the next day his ex-wife is dead. There's loads of random dead ends and strategically placed clues that only seem to take up a sentence.
It's my first attempt at something like this so it's entertaining me.
53,727 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2007 - 18 33
Thanks for the advice guys. I managed to totally get myself out of this rut a few minutes after I posted this, and I've actually doubled my word count!
I seriously wrote, like, six thousand words today. My head hurts. But in a good way. I went back and two whole separate plot lines and the whole thing is much, much more interesting now.
Screw the advice that you shouldn't go back and reread anything, it helped a lot. I realized it wasn't awful, and I ended up adding a bunch of stuff that upped my word count! Yay!
----------The Magician With Mob Connections
A magician is taken into protective police custody after receiving a death threat from a notorious serial killer, while he is in the midst of planning an elaborate bank robbery with an organized crime ring.
43,926 / 50,000
Nov 6, 2007 - 20 57
Dear Megh,
You absolutely can't know if what you've written is crap at this point. Keep going! A first draft is a discovery draft, and after you write it and set it aside for awhile, then you'll be able to figure out what your *real* story is It may be one incredibly unique line in the whole story that makes you say, "Ah ha! That's the key." And then in your second draft you can make it less cliche.
You're doing awesome -- almost 13K words!
----------Laura Fitzgerald, Author of Veil of Roses
www.laurafitzgerald.com
50,172 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2007 - 00 17
In my opinion, any editor, even the harshest of harsh, should never tell you to trash a story. Their job is to take whatever you've got and give you advice and improve it, not shoot it down completely, even if it goes against their will. You're the creator, not them.
I don't read many suspense/mystery/gang novels, so I can't give you an educated say on whether or not your plot sounds original enough. But as far as spicing up novels, I like to give each of my characters a crippling, unique flaw. Sometimes it's a mental/physical disability that makes their journey all the tougher to get through. Sometimes it's a character flaw, which every character should have regardless, but I like to take from the Seven Deadly Sins (original, I know) as a source and apply one of the major sins to my main characters. Or if you have a minor character that's crucial to your story, especially near the climax. If this minor character has information/help/whatever to offer the protagonist, they could be deaf or suffer from a mental disability that makes communicating hard, or the bad guys could lock them up... ANYTHING to make the lives of the main character(s) as difficult as possible, basically :]
----------icon by moonswing on livejournal.
comment by me.