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.
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