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| This picture is from my junior year of HS. I'm rowing Stroke (the front rower). NaNo is sort of like a regatta, except if you stop rowing in a regatta, your team-mates kill you. |
I had a moment where I knew a scene had gone wrong because I realized that my outline had my heroine getting caught by the "cops" of that world THREE times in a single day, and twice for the same offense. Um. TSTL* much?
Now, this all made sense in my outline, and the first time she got caught made total sense and worked very well. The second time, though, was the problem. I was going to have her encounter one of the other main characters, who is an officer, to show he's not always a douche-nozzle (though he usually is). However, I realized that it made her seem unspeakably stupid to get caught out after curfew twice in a row. Also, it made the douche-nozzle character too nice, too fast.
So instead, I introduced another character--a contact my main character could have in the city that gives her life a sense of history. I love it when problems can be solved with new characters, because I get to populate my world and my character's history with interesting people. They don't seem like they stepped straight out of space and time and onto the page, timelord style.
This particular character's name is Rat, and he's sort of a common-tier foil for the officer character, who is a noble. He's that hot-but-frustratingly-arrogant thief-type I love so much, but pushing a bit farther down the path of coward than I usually make these sorts of characters.
He's not in my outline, but I can just feel that I'm going to be using him again later.
Of course, I didn't delete all the words I wrote permanently, and I'm still counting them towards NaNoWriMo. I just back-tracked and fixed something that had me stuck pretty bad.