Well, this week came out just over 5,000 words for weekly progress, which is decent movement forward. I missed my 7,000 word goal mostly because I had a busy work week and some personal family commitments to handle, which is just going to happen sometimes. However, I did get past the block I had with Niamsha last week and moved into what I hope is the last chapter I don’t have a plan for in my head. That might be a bad thing–I tend to write better when I don’t have a plan–but I’m close enough to the end now that my usual “let’s see where this goes” attitude doesn’t work anymore. It needs to go in the right direction or the book won’t have a resolution, and no one wants that. A couple notable events about this week’s writing:

Niamsha took some initiative and got herself and some friends into trouble. I’m happy with the direction that’s heading, which is giving me a strong resolution to work toward for her storylineKilasha got dragged back into the rest of the action for a bit, but only on the sidelines. Not quite sure how that’s going to resolve just yet, so that’s in an interesting placeThe total draft is currently at just over 124,000 words, which is 73% of my original goal word count. I’ve said before that I expect this draft to run a bit long, but we’ll see where we end up. This is just the first round, after allThoughts on diverging storylines

I know a lot of authors are actually quite concerned when their characters end up in separate locations not directly interacting with each other regularly. I’m thinking about that today because my characters have been wandering all over the place and rarely have anything to do with each other directly. However, their decisions are causing ripples through larger communities that other characters have to react to, so its all weaving into the same plot. My initial response to this structure was to worry if readers would be frustrated by not seeing the characters have direct conflict and face each other down. Then I remembered Lord of the Rings.

The opening of Fellowship of the Rings focuses entirely on Sam, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin and we see them entirely together. They struggle because of forces beyond their control. They meet Strider and eventually get to Rivendel and the Fellowship is formed. But moving forward from there, the group stays together a pretty short period of time before Sam and Frodo go off one way, Merry and Pippin have their own thing going on, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli go their way. And for the rest of the story, it isn’t that the characters don’t interact so much as that they don’t physically see each other.

A similar pattern is visible in Wheel of Time. The characters start together, gather a few more allies, and then end up split and doing their own thing. They’re still working toward the same goals and mostly in support of each other, but they each have their own problems to solve. Same with Game of Thrones, as well, and many other epic fantasy books.

It’s interesting to me, then, that many authors I’ve spoken to worry about separating their characters. Don’t we have to separate them in a longer series? If I kept them all together, how would any of them form their own paths? I’m interested now to find series with a larger cast of characters that don’t separate for the majority of the later portions of the series. How do the characters grow within the confines of a group dynamic?