I'm having a bit of a crisis of confidence. After attending the Writers Digest conference this past weekend and thinking about the amount of time, money, and effort that I'm going to be spending on my first story, I have to give some serious thought to whether Ivan is worth it.
I'm going to say, for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, November), that yes, Ivan is worth the effort. I might get a lot wrong and he might never see the light of day, but I think it's still worth it to at least put Ivan at the center of my 50,000 word goal for November and sort out what I need to work on more carefully as I polish him up in 2013.
Here are a couple of things that need to be worked out:
1. The historical Ivan is not a terribly sympathetic character. But it's going to be one slog of a novel if I can't find a chink in his armor of awfulness that makes somebody like something about him (that somebody being me).
2. I've got to find some humor somewhere, because a) I don't want to get too hung up on myself and b) Ivan is so awful that if I can't find a way to lighten the whole thing up it's going to read too much like a Russian novel -- and I hate Russian novels.
3. Supporting cast. This is actually only an obstacle to my starting writing before November 1st, because I've got to take the time to figure out who the supporting cast is and write them all out, figure out more of a plot arc than what I've got, etc. I need to decide if I'm going to use The Plot Whisperer Workbook or 30 Days to your Novel or The Nighttime Novelist to frame my to-do list, but clearly I'm going to need some outside help on planning the thing if I'm going to write 50,000 words in a 30 day month that includes Thanksgiving.
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