Blimey! Almost done, but I'm stuck! Word Count 73,183 (wp) 92,000 (pr)
Monday, June 04, 2007, 10:40 PM
After yesterday's self-admonishment for procrastinating, I sat down last night and churned out a decent lump of wordage, and this evening I've churned out another pile. I'm at the penultimate scene of the entire novel. This is the big showdown between protagonist and antagonist. It's been building up over a lot of pages, and tension has been mounting.
Problem is, the good guy (of sorts) and the bad guy (no ambiguity, he's just bad) are face-to-face in a stand off with no way out. There's an innocent party in peril (and that's also a point of concern, as it's edging close to one of those lines we're not supposed to cross) and as it stands, I can't see how my protagonist can prevail, or indeed the antagonist for that matter. All right, this makes for a wonderfully tense climax, but that's no good if I can't resolve it.
And there'll be no Deus Ex Machina to swoop in and save the day. Robert McKee's warnings on that are very clear (Google 'Robert McKee' and 'Ten Commandments' if you don't get that reference!).
Quandary!
After this there'll be the denouement, which packs as big a punch, if not bigger, than the climax to story proper. And then it'll be done.
I just need to figure out how to get there.
Problem is, the good guy (of sorts) and the bad guy (no ambiguity, he's just bad) are face-to-face in a stand off with no way out. There's an innocent party in peril (and that's also a point of concern, as it's edging close to one of those lines we're not supposed to cross) and as it stands, I can't see how my protagonist can prevail, or indeed the antagonist for that matter. All right, this makes for a wonderfully tense climax, but that's no good if I can't resolve it.
And there'll be no Deus Ex Machina to swoop in and save the day. Robert McKee's warnings on that are very clear (Google 'Robert McKee' and 'Ten Commandments' if you don't get that reference!).
Quandary!
After this there'll be the denouement, which packs as big a punch, if not bigger, than the climax to story proper. And then it'll be done.
I just need to figure out how to get there.
Labels: novels
posted by Stuart Neville at 10:40 PM
1 Comments:
It's one word after another, that's how you get there.
One time I was revising a scene on my laptop in my living room. I was very tense. It was a frightening scene that I hadn't read for a long time--several months. Truly, I'd forgotten.
I was just reading along, all tight, too caught up in it to even revise (I was going to have to go back over it) and I literally could not recall how they were going to get out of it--but I did recall how damned hard it was to write.
And then the light over my shoulder (on a timer) switched off. I jumped a mile.
This scene sounds like one of those, so good work. Keep going, I'm waiting to read!
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