Day 2

The second day of Novermber is a much better barometer than the first for measuring how your NaNoWriMo experience is going to shape up. Each day is better than the previous up until about the fifth, and then you know that you can make or that you won't. But, the second day is still a pretty good measure. And it tells me that I'm going to have a good month.

I've been thinking a lot about necessary conditions for writing a book, hopefully a good book. I think first and foremost, you have to fall in love with your main character(s). You might hate some or maybe even all the things they do, but you have to love them. If the author can't love them, then how can the reader be expected to care about them? It is obvious why you (the writer) would love a hero or an anti-hero, but why you need to love the villains is not as obvious. Doesn't it make sense that the worse things the villain does, the more diabolical and dastardly she is, the more you would hate her? No, because you don't want to write about things you hate. I know that I don't. But, if I make the villain someone I can love, but hate all of their acts, well, that is someone I can write about. I'm not just playing a semantic game here, though I do like semantic games, especially multi-player semantic games. Loving a villain is taking the time to make them a full character, not a one-dimensional version of a character. Also, I think in many ways, evil acts seem even more evil when they are committed by someone I can identify with, because I can imagine that they could choose not to do evil.

[I'm using good and evil as illustrative terms, and not necessarily as to mean the extremes that are implied - more like good is anything more good than neutral, and evil is anything more evil than neutral.]

I was talking to someone who I almost got to participate in NaNoWriMo this year and she commented that she writes at least several thousand words a day in comments on forums. Wow! I probably write 500 to a 1000 words a day in forums, and I find it to be such a slow process because in my case it's dialogical. But, I got to thinking about forums and blogs and if I could harness the energy that I put into those things and stick it in a novel... I'm not really going anywhere else with this idea. I just think it would be cool if I could do this. :)

Okay, back to the novel. I want to do at least another couple of hundred words before I update my daily word count.