End of Part Two (or possibly Three)

 

Well, it’s just gone 12.30 on November the 16th and the first draft of the NaNoWriMo story is, in theory, just about two thirds of the way through. The third act will, once again, open some years after the second closes so I am taking the afternoon off and seeing a movie in order to generate the sufficient sense of narrative distance (I would have done this anyway but now I can justify doing it, I hope).

As things currently stand I am on a shade more than 72,000 words and 160 pages on MS Word (this translates into about a 250-page paperback if the NaNo formula is to be believed) and feeling quite cheerful about the story itself. Somewhat to my surprise this middle section ended up being more about the characters’ personalities and relationships, and the complicated political situation the world has become entangled in (another rather obvious steal from The Kraken Wakes), than the actual main plot motor of the alien life-form. I’m worried that all this stuff is rather melodramatic and unconvincing – I thought this was going to be a story about meteorology, not the failure of couples to properly communicate with each other – but I suppose fixing it will be one of the things I do in the second draft, should I decide to do one.

At least now I can relax in the knowledge that all the characters and major locations have been introduced, all the plot seeds sown (well, a new one’s just occurred to me, but I think that’ll have to wait for Part Three, for reasons to do with plausibility and not telegraphing the ending), all the character dynamics sorted out, and so on, and I can just cruise through the scenes of collapsing civilisation and the desperate struggle to survive that are the main thing that attracted me to this story in the first place.

I’m still talking about it in terms of a three-act structure, which I suppose still just about holds water. Parts One and Two, more through luck than anything else, have clocked in at roughly the same length in both words and pages. At one point it looked like Two would be coming in rather short, and – purely for my own sense of structure – I had been contemplating splitting Part One in two. There’s an obvious junction point about six chapters in where the story skips forwards a couple of years… yes, I know this isn’t very interesting.

I may still do this, but if so I think I’ll split Part Three as well. it looks like it’ll be a lot longer than either of the other two, and there is another natural junction point some way into it – not quite sure exactly how far, but that’s the fun of it. There’ll still be a three-act structure, ish, but spread over five actual chunks of story. I think that’ll work. I’ll let you know how it pans out.