Fiction Mondays: Halfway?

Well, November is halfway over, which means that so is National Novel Writing Month. I'm right at my word count goal, over 25,000 with half of the month left to go, and I can come to a conclusion I arrived at before this thing even started: 50,000 words is nowhere near long enough to constitute a fully-formed novel, at least the way I write. Now, that is not to say I think the month (so far) has been a bust in any way--the opposite, in fact--it tells me that my idea, "Chanterelles," needs more room to breathe than 50,000 will allow. Here's the thing: the story is about forming a band, recording and album, and heading out on tour. That's the first part, and the second part is the unraveling of that band (not in the usual ways bands tend to fall apart, bickering and bloated, in that kind of story, just so you know).

But here's the problem: in the first 25,000 words, a band has formed. It took a lot of people figuring out how this was going to work, making deals and poaching members of other bands, to form the thing in the first place. And while that's coming along, the protagonist has his own things going on, plus there needs to be enough that the lead singer is not just the lead singer, but a three-dimensional character. She needs to write a song (she has), but she also needs to understand the nature of the business--and of the current trends in music that she's up against (see my earlier post, re: the schizophrenia of pop music in 1966). So this is all happening before they step into the studio.

So here is what I'm saying: unless I gloss over huge sections, there is no way this thing is going to fit into 50,000 words. When I'm working on a longer piece, I am a hybrid of the type of writer who plans things and the type who wings it. I love setting up a lot of pieces in the beginning to see how they are going to play out in the second half. That discovery, that moment where I understand how things from that first half are going to fit together or come apart in the end, is one of my favorite parts of writing. I know roughly what happens in the second half--very roughly--but it's the discovery of why that might happen, or the way it does, that excites me.

Here is how I see the rest of the month playing out: I'm going to get to 50,000 words, but I do not expect the last two to be "The End." I will just keep writing, keep on setting things up so that at the moment things turn, I know exactly how the characters are going to react. There is a very good chance that the 50,000 word mark will be right in the middle of that section, where everything makes sense and I can begin to see the final parts, but no, my 50,000 words will not be anything but a beginning. And I think that's okay: if the goal of this enterprise is to force you to just get that draft out, I will be on the path to doing that, and too wrapped up in it to slow down. To me, that will mean it's been a successful month.