NaNo #5

Everything is progressing well in my attempt to complete a whole month of novel writing,as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and to produce 50,000 words

Everything is going surprisingly well, and when I say surprisingly… I mean that I am surprised not just that’s it’s going well and I’m keeping up to speed with the word count, but that surprising things are happening in the story I’m writing. My idea sounded fairly dry, and I wondered how I could make it interesting, the story of a family with an unusual surname trying to trace their roots; I had a few ideas for adding a little excitement, a few fisticuffs, a few unexpected relationships (brothers marrying sisters-in-law, paternity issues, genealogical intrigue) but I really wondered whether it would end up as a dry litany of family trees and census returns. However, a character who I had always planned on being in the story,suddenly brings a whole new theme of food and cooking and baking (very topical with the success of The Great British Bake-Off!) and some new ideas have sprung into my mind as I begin to research the far distant reaches of the 1841 census.

It’s happened before in my books where a minor character, introduced to pad out a scene, suddenly takes over and becomes a major player. It happened in ‘The Stalking of Rosa Czekov’ where a guest invited for dinner just to make up the numbers becomes one of the major characters in the novel. In one of the scenes in my Radwinter story that I’m writing for NaNo, Thomas is at work and a young woman who works in the office brings him some papers; I needed her to speak to him in order for him to have a new train of thought, and when she did somehow her words were cheeky and almost rude… this was Kylie. I don’t know where she came from, she just sprang off the keyboard; she’s sassy and clever, cheeky and actually very funny (although Thomas doesn’t realise this yet)) She appeared again, and again her main purpose was to prompt Thomas into thinking along a different line… and now I have had a whole scene between them where he goes out to buy some doughnuts, and meets her where she is outside having a cigarette.

As it is a story about family, most of the characters are members of the family… but this really leads to the land of dull… there has to be someone from outside… and maybe there will be more someones…. but at the moment there is just Kylie.