Novel Progress 2

As of now, a have about 27,000 words of rough draft, so the 1000-words-per-day pace is holding. I've come up with several secondary characters and am getting a feel for their personalities. I've also thought up some ideas for the opposition.

I've read advice that when planning novels one should start with the plot and create characters to fit, and I've read advice that one should start with the characters and develop a plot based on the characters' desires. For better or worse, I started with the main character and a problem he had volunteered to solve.

The main character is actually someone who has been kicking around in my mind for some time. I've tried to write stories about him and a couple of other characters before, but I've always given up 10,000 to 20,000 words in when I realized how derivative everything I wrote struck me. This time I told myself that I didn't care, that I would concentrate on coming up with a story that I thought was fun and quit worrying about being derivative.

The goal is to get a rough draft completed from beginning to end. Once I have that to work with, I can cut or replace anything that I think readers have seen too often. The interesting thing is, now that I've made the commitment to keep going, the ideas have been starting to flow.

I have a good idea of what the opposition wants. I think it is a well-intended goal, not a cartoon evil-for-evil's-sake that one too often sees in fantasy. The conflict will be generated by their methods causing problems and the goal itself causing unintended consequences. I hope I have the skill to pull it off.

I still have no idea what the ending is going to be.

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