The rest of my stay at my parents’ house in Palm Springs was most productive. I even managed to get my pages in on Thanksgiving morning before the kitchen prep started. Friday (Day 23) I wrote during my layover in Phoenix, despite feeling sad and lonely having just left my family, and then wrote on my flight until my laptop battery was gone. I landed in the Burgh ahead of schedule and ahead of quota, a nice end to a great trip. I now find myself facing the home stretch. Just one problem…
I fear I’m running out of content. I’m not sure how to fill up five days and 8,000 words. The feeling is akin to running out of month before you run out of money. Can you say “stretch?” Only the end of a novel shouldn’t stretch. There are many adjectives it should be (fast-paced, tension building, surprising etc.), but stretched is not one of them. How do you plan for a novel to come to its end at a certain page count anyway?
Now I fear I’ve jinxed myself even writing about the fear. But I’m just going to keep on writing. The characters have surprised me before; hopefully they’ll do it again.
You’re in a great position, even though it doesn’t feel like it.
At your current rate, you’ll finish your plot sometime after you meet your wordcount quote — so instead of focusing on words, you get to focus on plot points. (You’ll still want to watch the words, but I suspect you’ll find you’re well past the minimum by the time your plot ends.
So now, what you might consider doing is writing the key moments for all the scenes that need to lead to your novel’s end. That is, you can leave out every bit of boring connective tissue that would go between the excitement, and just write the very best bits of the things leading to the end.
You might write a sentence for each bit of connection, so that you don’t lose the train of thought. Like, “Now they get in the car and drive, and they get lost along the way but then they figure out that the directions were wrong, and in the course of blaming each other they have this conversation.” And then you write the conversation scene, which is when they realize they are in love with each other but that it never can be, and they’re sad but they have to keep going. (Obviously I just made up those characters and the plot point, but if that fits your novel please feel free to go with it. My gift to you.)
The other benefit of writing a sentence for each connecting bit is that, if you wrap up the novel and startlingly don’t have enough words, you can go back and flesh out one or two of those connecting bits, and thereby meet the total word count. No one cares what order you wrote the scenes in.
You go, girl!
I fear I’m in the second category: my story is nearing the end before I have 50,000 words. But you’re right, if that’s the case I can flush things out. Both your strategies help me move forward from a feeling of stuck-ness. Thanks!