October 15th – 896,539

It very much looks like I’ll pass the 900k mark tomorrow and enter that final lap of this challenge. Today although a quiet day has taken a little longer to hit my word count, but I stopped at 4,326 words. Transition scenes are always slower, I much prefer the action, dialogue heavy scenes where I can get my characters interacting without needing me. I guess that’s why my dialogue passages hit such speeds. Transitional scenes take a lot more thought, you can’t let your characters take their conversation all over the place and down some dead ends – you have to marshal them and keep control.

Your story has to get from A to B and sometimes onward to C before you can relax again, otherwise the story won’t make any sense. IF you’re having to think that much about what you’re writing, then you’re naturally going to be slower, even if you don’t want to, especially given that any transition scene will present you with pacing issues – you can’t let the pace of your novel slow during this phase – if you do the story will die on its feet once you get it in front of your readers, which will kill the book.

Let’s face it a transitional scene isn’t the most exciting part of the book either for you as a writer or for “them” as readers, so it needs to be quick, it needs to read quick, and above all it needs to move the characters on as much as it moves the story on.

I’m not going to get into lectures about arcs and lines, and all the theoretical stuff – other people are better at explaining or teaching that stuff than I am.

Never mind, 900k tomorrow! Only 100k to go then.