It’s NaNoWriMo again, National Novel Writing Month 2020. This year’s novel does not have a final title yet, but the idea is to do something a little different. Six of my novels have male protagonists, and they are quite similar: all are American expatriates living in Japan; all but one are middle-aged; all but one are educators (four professors and an English teacher); they are smart but not too confident otherwise; mental problems are not uncommon (three suffer from depression); all are soft spoken, with strong internal emotions but not effusive outsides; they are thinkers and internal dialogue is not uncommon; all are tall and trim; they are reasonably handsome; none are sexually aggressive or even adventuresome; and all are open to finding an attachment, someone to love. They are nice guys in difficult situations who end up being helped or even rescued by women.
I thought this year for NaNoWriMo it would be nice to stretch and write a character who is not as nice. So this protagonist is going to be a curmudgeon, or even irascible, at least to start.
I also do not plan to win NaNoWriMo as quickly this year. My primary goal is still simply to win (write fifty thousand words), but I would like to make that happen over twenty days. If I write twenty-five hundred words a day, I can finish the month with a seventy-five-thousand-word novel. Even pounding out that many words in the month would make the novel shorter than any others I have written.
It’s odd that I have written as much as I have and yet I still feel trepidation at the start of every project, wondering whether I can turn it into something worthwhile. Could that be a good thing, a little humility, perhaps? Or is it part of the reason my protagonists are as weak as they are?