When the plot stops

I'm working on a fantasy novel this month (and probably beyond November and NaNoWriMo) but found that my interest had flagged a little this weekend. What was up with that?

I realized that I had let the plot stumble into a chapter of conversation.  No action, just conversation.  And, even more painful to admit, I had steered that conversation into backstory and an information dump.  No wonder the story was hard going all of a sudden.

So I struck through an entire chapter (hated to just delete all those words.  Maybe some of the conversation will reappear in the middle of a fight scene.... well, I can dream...)  and stuck some more action.  Suddenly we've gone from chit-chat around a fire pit to drama on a falling log.

This revelation is thanks to Jeff Gerke's book, The Art and Craft of Writing Fiction, where he slashed through dry dialogue and other forms of telling, zeroing in on showing us the story.  Dialogue isn't necessarily telling, but mine was and I am moving on to more showing.

Names

Picking the right names for my characters can bog me down.  I want my main characters to have perfect names, whatever those are.

Recently I named a character "Ken" but after two chapters decided he really wasn't a Ken but a Mark.  So I did a find&replace.  That worked well until I re-read chapter 1 to discover that my main character had not "taken a walk" but "taMark a walk."  So be careful with those name changes.

I like to use the Social Security popular baby names page, which shows me the top names for each year.  That helps me find a name appropriate to the age of my character.

And I also found a list of most common surnames, in case I can't think of those.  That list is at Mongabay.com.

In my current WIP, my main character is named Addie.  After my kids asked, "Why THAT name?" I had to admit I had no good reason.  Who knows?  We may be doing a find and replace soon.  Or not.

First drafts

James Scott Bell has an excellent post today at The Kill Zone about writing that first draft.  It's easy to overanalyze your work in a first draft rather than just pounding it out.  Bell lists four basics for the first draft.  Concentrate on those and edit later.  Check it out.