So the reason I haven’t posted in a while is this damned NanoWriMo business I’ve involved myself with. As of 3 a.m. this morning, I finally broke the 30000 word barrier. As you can see from this widget I am, as of this writing, slightly ahead of Chris Baty in the word war:
The problem with writing that many words in a single month is that I can’t be as meticulous as I usually am when I write. I’m just making shit up as I go along without regard for whether anything I write is plausible. I have to say that there’s something to be said about working this way. This isn’t wholly different than writing when I was in grad school being as the deadlines were purposely tight to force you to write copious amounts of words in a short period of time. The difference being that you were expected to revise your work and you were expected to produce something publishable. The difference being that in grad school, I tended to write things that had been pickling in my brain for a long while so by the time I wrote them down, it was just typing really. Writing a novel from scratch in one month requires a lot of free association. Going from point A to point B by way of point C or something like that. Make an off-the-cuff statement that may or may not be true, form a sentence. Motorhome towing is dangerous. Well, I had an uncle who sold motorhomes who, when I was a kid, was killed while he was moving a trailer for a client. Apparently, a tire went flat and he had to jack the thing up to change it. The jack collapsed and the whole thing fell on top of his head, crushing him to death. So now through this association, I have a scenario — man gets crushed by mobile home. This could be the launching point of a novel or a flashback stuff into the middle somewhere. You make 50000 thousand words by stringing associations and scenarios together. You string enough of them together, you have a novel — maybe not a good one, but a novel nonetheless.
Patricia | 22-Nov-09 at 1:37 pm | Permalink
I’ve thought a lot too about the differences and similarities between academic writing and novel writing. I enjoyed academic writing, I believe, because it required precision and structure. Now, I’m enjoying novel writing (and thus, NaNoWriMo) because I can throw structure and precision to the wind–and just let my characters carry me to where they want to go. It’s a fun ride!
John Erianne | 23-Nov-09 at 3:02 am | Permalink
Yeah, I’ll have to agree that NaNoWriMo has been an adventure. Of course, it’s also keeping me from doing a lot of important things too. It’s been a vacation from real problems and real responsibilities, but it’s also helping me feel like a real writer again. My creative writing output has been so anemic this year. It’s pathetic.