NaNoWriMo & "Hunger Games"
Books50k words in one month. What's not to like?
The problem here is narrowing down the story ideas to one that is mostly developed and doesn't have a complicated plot. The time travel story will have to wait until later, I am afraid--far to complex in structure for a "write, write, write" month, although I've been musing about it since Switzerland. Ditto the one set in the Middle East--not developed enough at this point, though I am seriously considering writing down the couple of critical scenes I've been developing in my head since last summer. I am hovering in indecision between two ideas that came from short stories I already wrote. I have two more days to think about it.
What would you write about if you had only one month?
I finally broke down and read the "Hunger Games" Trilogy last week. It took a little over 24 hours to consume. I loved it and devoured it until the last ... oh, about 20 pages or so. Then the ending completely fell apart. (One of my Boot Camp buddies commented that Orson Scott Card probably ruined us for life after teaching us critical reading/editing skills.) If you loved the books, please don't be offended that I feel like I can't recommend them. At least part of the problem was that I read them in one day. Since I loved, loved, loved the first two, I might have felt differently if I had spent a year waiting to read the last one. But... I didn't. I read them as though they were one book and the ending was ... odd.
*Possible Spoilers*
My biggest issue with the ending was that the main premise of the trilogy was that, for no reason Katniss can figure, nearly everyone would do anything for her. Over and over we see people she barely knows risking their lives, giving their lives, following her from hellhole to hellhole. In the final pages, though, nearly everyone disappears. Seriously... where was Gale when she was in the hospital? He disappears to a new job somewhere with no explanation. Etc. Etc. One friend suggested an explanation that went along the lines of "everyone having post traumatic stress syndrome" or some such thing. Perhaps, but this is never really spelled out. No explanation is ever given or even hinted at. Look, like Card told us at Boot Camp, "I'll believe anything if you justify it." There was simply no justification for the mass exodus of main and secondary characters (with the possible exception of Kantiss's mother, whom was never very in-the-picture from the beginning). The ending was far too short with far too little information about main and secondary characters I had grown to love over the course of the 2 7/8 books that I had followed them through. I needed more, and there wasn't more. End of story.
I still love the first two books. *End of Spoilers*
Writing lesson: Get that manuscript to a Wise Reader or two that you trust. Ask after they read the ending how satisfied they were. You do not need to write the ending they would have loved--this isn't group fan fiction time, for goodness sake--but readers need to feel like they saw loose ends tied up in a way that makes sense based on what you already wrote. Endings are important. They are very hard to write. They are also the last thing your readers will see of your writing before moving on. Make them count because that is how you will be remembered.