If, over the next few weeks, you see someone sitting in a coffee shop staring at nothing and muttering about how to get rid of a body or what would happen if cats could time-travel by sneezing, do not be alarmed. It’s novel-writing time again.
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It began in 1999 when freelance writer Chris Baty became frustrated at his inability to finish or even begin writing a novel. To force himself to sit down and write something, anything, he enlisted 20 friends for an impossible dare: hammer out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
It didn’t have to be well plotted, edited, or even very good. It just had to get written, and by that lofty criterion six participants (including Baty) managed it via massive quantities of caffeine, encouragement, and dogged perseverance.
Word spread. Media coverage, word of mouth, and that enclave of frustrated writers, the Internet, helped the number of dedicated literary masochists rise dramatically. This year 25,000 people are expected to sign up and thereby abandon social life, regular hygiene and workplace productivity to achieve the lifelong dream of becoming a really bad novelist.
That’s a dream I share, and so last year I dove right in. How tough could it be? Crank out 1,667 words a day, no sweat.
By the end of the first week I was indeed starting to sweat, more or less continually. By the third week I was twitching and beginning to hallucinate that giant keyboards were trying to drown me in Mountain Dew and drag me off to the Writing Mines. A friend and coworker was also a ‘WriMo’ that year and she persisted in gleefully e-mailing me hourly with her obviously inflated word count. Somehow, I knew, she was sneaking into my brain at night and treacherously stealing armloads of words.
I crossed the 50,000-word finish line on November 30 with half an hour to spare, although I’m not proud of how I did it — I decided my main character was suffering from traumatic flashbacks and I copied the entire first chapter over again.
This year I’ll be ready. All those years of shamelessly padding school essays have not been wasted, and I’ll be using these techniques as I confidently sit down at 12:01 November 1st.
— Never use contractions or acronyms. If space aliens are using their forehead lasers to destroy teams of bikini-clad supermodel scientists, have them explain that ‘laser’ stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation with every shot, right up until the fighter pilots from National Aeronautics & Space Administration blasts them.
— Devise a protagonist with interesting quirks, such as the obsessive habit of reciting Kipling’s “Gunga Din” — 573 words, including annotations — during times of stress. This can really up the old word count, especially if they stutter.
— Ninjas, ninjas, ninjas.
— Famous quotes can jazz up a book. Consider starting each chapter with a relevant Shakespearean play.
— If you write anything at all in November, use it in your book. Anything. Shopping lists, business memos, petitions for constitutional amendments, ransom notes, anything. Copy all of your unwanted e-mail and give it a chapter title.
— Public record government documents can add odd bits of randomness to your plot. Say, for example, bill H. Con. Res. 13, ‘Recognizing the importance of blues music, and for other purposes,’ introduced in this year’s Congress, which provides a fast 425 words and an increased appreciation for what politicians do all day.
There’s still time to sign up. There’s no fee, no obligation, no penalties for failure. Only the thrill of creativity, the heady joy that comes from realizing you’re actually writing a novel, the cathartic blowout party afterwards, and bragging rights forever. But the real reason I urge you to sign up is simpler than that.
Misery loves company, and I don’t want to get dragged to the Writing Mines alone.