Friday 30th November

So NaNoWriMo reaches a close, and yes I have achieved the goal. I wrote most of yesterday and came close to finishing, with just 500 words to complete today. My Main Character had already reached the finish line ahead of me, so I had to go back in the book and create a new scene extension to fill the required number of words, but there were plenty of places where I have dropped ideas along the way, so adding one of these was easy.

It's interesting how the character has developed over this month of writing about him. As I have interviewed someone who experienced these conditions in the second world war, I started with him in mind, but the novel character started to exert his own character part way through the writing. So I now have a much clearer idea of what he is about. So, now I need to clean up the start of he story and build this character deliberately as the story unfolds.

Some of the minor characters have become quite important as well, developing strong personalities. I guess I hadn't expected this at the start, but it helps with developing a much fuller, engaging book.

So, no writing for a week or so - I'm going to leave the book to self-develop for a while. Then the editing begins!