It's NaNoWriMo Time Again!

We love the romantic idea of a writer chipping away at a grand narrative during 30-minute lunch breaks at a lousy shift-work job and 30-second intervals at stop lights.  It's oh-so-Faulkneresque.  But what's it like during a novel marathon?

It's pretty much like running the traditional kind of marathon that uses your legs except you're using your brain and your fingers.  And let's just go ahead and admit that the metaphor stops being useful right about here, because, well, for a visual person, that's just kind of creepy.

Full disclosure -- I'm going to speak from the point of view of someone who went through the 3-Day Novel Marathon held at the end of each summer and not NaNoWriMo, which is every November.  The similarities outweigh the differences, so I'll offer my personal experience.

First of all, my experience was not like this.

I'll admit that rationality is the natural enemy of hype, but I knew in advance that trying to stay awake, witty and literate for three days sans sleep would guarantee that even if by some miracle I finished my novel, the closing chapters would be word salad.  Nothing but an unintelligible vowel movement all over the page.

Balance and commitment are your friends.  I would pare everything extraneous from my life except for writing, sleeping and staying alive.  In practical terms, this meant 12 hours of writing on the first day, a good night's rest, 12 hours of writing on the second day, another good night's rest and eight hours on the final day followed by a short break for recovering some modicum of perspective and then a couple hours reading my wee novel and changing the word "happy" to "glad" and calling that editing.

There's no starter pistol.  I was not going to start at 12:01am.  I would not lose my precious beauty sleep.  I would not skip meals or do anything (ahem) unsanitary with a bucket under my chair to remove the need to ever stand up.

Let's do some math here.  One paragraph every three minutes, five to a page, one page every fifteen minutes, that makes four pages an hour over 32 hours for 128 pages.  Maybe a little less if you carve out time for finger calisthenics, bathroom breaks, one-handed typing while you scarf down a sandwich lovingly prepared by my amazingly-supportive wife, etc.  In terms of page count, that only makes for a novella but that's the chief difference between the 3-Day Novel Marathon and NaNoWriMo right there.  Page count.  You're not writing Infinite Jest on a long weekend.

Every writer has their own tricks.  A self-imposed retreat to a cheap motel.  A self-imposed move to a cot in the home office.  A self-imposed stay at the cabin.  See the trend here?  This is an honour system -- there's no task master of any kind.  If you succumb to procrastinationitis and start dusting the ceiling fan or seeing how many paper clips you can attach to your nostrils, no one will protect you from your own absurdity.  My self-imposed thang was to sit on a plastic patio chair and write on my deliberately antiquated laptop computer clamped into a Black & Decker Workmate in the unfinished basement under a bare 60W bulb.  I wanted spartan.  I would be a monk.  No windows with a view of the cute widdo bunnies cavorting on the lawn.

By some miracle of uncharacteristic discipline, I kept to my page count and stuck nary a paperclip up my nose.  By the end of Day One, I had about 50 pages.  (I capitalize Day One because hey, let's give a marathon the respect it deserves.)  I saved my work, had dinner on the couch and watched a movie with 'splosions.

Day Two was when things got weird.  Before the 3-Day Novel Marathon, I needed to watch my fingers to type swiftly.  At some time during Day Two, I no longer needed to.  In fact, I freaked my wife right out by continuing to type a couple pages while she came down to feed me a tasty sandwich and recharge my tumbler of iced tea and we had a conversation about something.  Then I freaked myself out after she left and I realized I had no recollection whatsoever of what those two pages contained and, to my surprise, one character had told another a joke and it was a joke I personally did not know.  And it was kinda funny.

I think this was when I realized I was entering the dissociative state that corresponded to those shuffling zombies you sometimes see crossing the the finish line of those leg-using marathons.  I forged ahead.

I hit 110 pages.  I ate dinner on the couch.  'Splosions.  My wife reminded me to blink a bit more than was her wont.

Day Three.  Was that pain in my neck there before?  My fingers feel awfully stiff for such crackly rubber little things.  Whatever.  Don't bug me physiology, I've got a book to finish!  I had made better strides in my page count than expected and so I called it quits at noon with a page count clocking in at 132.  Yay me.

I hit <save>, then <print> and confirmed my computer wasn't going to balk at either of those functions.  Then I oozed out of my chair on legs reluctant to articulate far from a 90-degree angle.

We hopped in the car to do some errands.  I didn't trust myself to drive so I sat in the passenger seat and had silent conversations with my wife and pedestrians.

"Pardon?"

That dissociative state had taken a small toll.  To wit:  I had lost the ability to distinguish between inner monologue and conversation.  I had spent three days so totally immersed in the heads of my characters that anyone we drove past was fair game.  I had conversations with them, generously supplying their parts of the script in response to my lines, unaware that I was doing so.  When my wife asked me questions, I would respond silently, unaware that she couldn't hear me.  To rip off Steven Wright, I imagine this is what life would be like if I put a blank tape in my stereo, turned it up loud but lived next door to a mime.

Upon return to chez nous, I took a couple hours to read my script and change the aforementioned "happy" to "glad."  Nothing structural.  Nothing important.  I knew word salad was still a lurking threat and hey, would you trust someone in that state with criticial evaluatitive functions?  Neither did I.

Once the strain wore off, giddiness set in.  That felt good.  At just over 130 pages, that was up around the 75th percentile for page counts but despite being a short novel in general, it did not detract from the accomplishment I felt.

Here is where the experience correlates perfectly with NaNoWriMo.  It was transformative.  It was a validation, like I had just learned the secret password and been taught the secret handshake into a fraternity that traced back past Hemingway and even guys like Pope, Swift or Cervantes.

I had previously written a bunch of screenplays and even a longer kid's novel but this was an accomplishment.  I was in an order for men and women of a certain vocation.  I was an author.  I was a writer.

 

(Ryan FitzGerald is currently the in-house writer type guy and personal champion of the Novel template at Celtx.)

Comments

[writer employment]

thank you for this good article I really appreciated.

[biology project]

was very interesting to read. didn't know writing can be so exhausting