Pounding It Out, Day 8

Right on schedule at 13,000+ words. What I'm struggling with right now is to resist the urge to make it funny. I mean, I understand that comic relief is an important component to any story, but when I set out to write this, I intended a dark crime thriller, and as I go along each day, I keep hitting funny beats.

Which is not necessarily a problem. When I analyzed Money Shot, I found that it threw in a violent incident every now and then to keep things moving. I haven't done that so much in my book so far. Like I said in an earlier post, I may restructure after this draft is done, but right now I'm writing the story straight through. So I'm doing a lot of setting up right now, and in the absence of the violence that will propel the book in later chapters, I find I'm using a lot of humor to keep it moving. And as a smart friend of mine (and an awesome writer in her own right) observed last night when I brought this up, there's a difference between writing a comedy and writing something serious with characters who are funny. And she's right. That's the line I'm trying not to cross.

The thing I'm fighting with right now, though, is that as the book progresses, I'm seeing a way for it to come to an ironic end. I know, I know, I was supposed to plan the ending before starting, and I thought I did. But actually what I had planned was the climax, not the denouement. And I'm seeing where what I'm building now could move toward a final bit that is, not funny exactly, but ironic and meta and maybe too cheap for the darkness that went before it. Except then again, we're not talking about art here, but a quick and dirty crime novel.

I'm holding the idea in my head for now. We'll see what actually comes about when it comes about.