Oct 31 2001
NaNoWriMo
I signed up for NaNoWriMo — National
Novel Writing Month.
Already I’m thinking: what the hell was I thinking?
The idea is simple if mind-numbing in scope. You try to write a novel, along
with 5,000 other souls, in one month. That works out to about 1700 words per
day. This is… a lot of text, actually. At least four pages of text per day,
every day.
As far as I can tell, there are some tricks to make this easier: Don’t worry
about a coherent or logical plot. Don’t worry about character consistency. Don’t
worry about the quality of the text, or whether it’s understandable. The models
for this are more like James Joyce’s Ulysses, or maybe Faulkner. Feel
free to switch points of view, jump between different periods of time, even
within the same sentence. Heck, even the concept of “sentence” is
a limiting concept that can be ignored in pursuit of the word count.
So, I have no plot in mind, no story line, except that I know it needs to be
something for which it is relatively easy to add chapters, like Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales, and I will undoubtedly be ripping off actual events from
my life and disgorging them into the text, which means that I should probably
set it in current era.
Should be fun.