WRITING
A Writer’s Alternative to NaNoWriMoJERSEY CITY, NJ 20 October 2009 |
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Being that October is coming to a close and November fast approacheth, it’s that time of the year again. No, not the time to dress up like a naughty schoolgirl. Well, okay, maybe that time, too. And not taxes time, either, unless you’re on the quarterly taxes schedule, about which I’m sorry because that totally sucks for you. And while it’s the end of one year and the beginning of another according to many traditions, I’m not talking about that time, either.
No, it’s time to search the recesses of your hard drive for that one document that’s been languishing unfinished for so long, the one you promised yourself you would finish someday, when you had time. When you’re not dawdling about on Facebook and Twitter or making sure to keep up with every blog or following the exploits Kate plus eight sans Jon. You know the document I’m talking about. You think about it often: What if?
Everyone’s got one. Writers used to stick them in drawers, or trunks, and there they would remain, waiting for some attention, any attention.
So now it’s time to dust it off! It’s time to sign up on an Internet forum with lots of other people who all have Long Languished Projects, and it’s time to finally dedicate to those projects the time they so deserve.
A whole month!
That’s right: it’s National Novel Writing Month time. Are you quaking with anticipation?
I am. Or at least, I would be, except, here’s the thing: I’m a writer. I’ve been a writer since I was in sixth grade, when I read the end of Needful Things and simply knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that was what I wanted to do. Maybe even what I was Meant to do, if there is such a thing.
So I started doing it. I knew what I wanted to do. I was excited about it. So why wait?
I wrote half of a couple of novels in high school. They were crap.
I wrote a full couple of novels in college. They were crap, too.
I wrote a couple of novellas after college, while working in the City as a commercial producer, and then when I moved back home, while I was a substitute teacher. These, too, were crap.
I wrote a couple of novels while I was an editor. And a couple of screenplays. You guessed it: crap and more crap.
Thing was, at some point, while there was never anything actually good, there came a point where it was less crap. There came a point where the redeeming qualities outnumbered the horrifically hackneyed juvenilia I was setting down on the page.
No, really, I was. I swear to Christ that was what the first rejection letter I ever received called the sample I had sent. Then again, I was nineteen at the time, so it was probably a fair point. I was a hackneyed juvenile, after all.
After many, many years of writing and working, of applying ass to chair and setting down word after word every day, I eventually graduated from hackneyed juvenilia to competent-enough midlist fiction similar in spirit to a Timecop sequel. Again: swear to Christ. Again: rejection letter to prove it.
It took a long time. I focused on writing arguably to the exclusion of many other things; a lot of my friends have been married for several years already and have children or are planning to. My little brother married the year before I moved to Los Angeles to study writing at USC. My best friend is the first doctor injured troops see after they leave Afghanistan. I’m a second cousin, like, nine times over because all my cousins, including those younger than me, already have children. Through all those years, all that long time, I wrote every day. I wrote and rewrote novels and novellas, and eventually I even started to get actually good at it.
Now it’s National Novel Writing Month. Twitter is fast and furious with points to posts about plot and pacing (and alliteration, obvs), about how to Outline Now to Meet Your Goal! So far, more than 15,000 people have signed up to participate this year, and there’s still more than a week left; that number will probably quadruple over the next ten or so days.
I feel so left out. It’s a massive show of support for 15,000 people to write every day, to set down a little less than 2,000 words, but I already do that most days. I admit I somedays don’t reach that number—
“And somedays it don’t come easy, and somedays it don’t come hard. Somedays it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end.” (Meatloaf)—
But every day I try, and most days I succeed, and the days I don’t succeed I usually cover by writing a little more another day. Somedays I’ve managed 10,000. I’m not saying they’re all good words, mind you, although I am happy to report that more are good than bad anymore, and my first drafts require fewer rewrites than they used to.
So the whole sitting down to write for the month of November . . . I was planning to do that anyway.
In the can-do spirit of the season, however, I have come up with my own alternative to NaNoWriMo.
***
I call it National Surgery Performing Month, or, as such things go, NaSuPerMo, which means it even has a cooler abbrev.
See, when I was in high school, my goal was to go to med school, be a doctor, and write a book. No, really, it literally says that underneath my senior picture. When I won student of the month, I told the newspaper (because student of the month was a Very Big Deal in a Very Small Town) that I wanted to go to Harvard and be a heart surgeon.
We see how all that worked out for me.
But I feel positively empowered by this sense of possible accomplishment, and I think can harness all this terrific can-do-anything-including-write-that-novel-we-always-said-we-would-but-never-have energy into an endeavor like that.
Think about it: sure, doctors go to med school, but surgery is really just, like, a slice here and another there and then some sewing up after I’m done, right? I just built a whole mess of furniture—including a bookcase, a coffee table, a desk, and two beds—with my dad, so I learned how to use lots of power tools and cutting things, and how much more difficult than “Measure twice, cut once,” can surgery possibly be? I used to put together models—I mean like cars, not like Elle MacPherson—when I was a kid, so I’ve had plenty of practice at close range with fine motor skills.
And Hell, I was pre-med. I’ve been in bio labs. I’ve dissected fetal pigs and anesthetized amphibians. I’ve even literally skinned a cat, and then brought in a Dremel to crack its skull to get at its brain. I’ve worked with scalpels plenty of times and never cut anything I wasn’t supposed to—well, there was that one time, but she shouldn’t have put her finger in the way of my scalpel. Master at work, woman! I’ve even watched a bunch of surgeries, including a few cataract and arthroscopies but also one in which an orthopedic surgeon constructed the malformed hand of a three-year-old boy using skin from the pubic region for a graft because of consistencies in nerve endings and hair growth. All emphasis added because how seriously cool is that?
And I can sew. I used to be a Boy Scout. I’m an Eagle Scout, in fact, and my mother made me sew all my merit badges onto my sash. There were 21 of those. In the intervening years, I’ve replaced plenty of buttons. I’ve even darned a sock, which is even more complicated because you have to turn it inside out first to make an internal mend.
See? Internal mending. It’s perfect.
Finally, I’m loud, so I can urgently ask for forceps or a number-2 gauge scalpel or gauze with the best of them and make it sound like it’s really important by also including the word “stat,” which is Latin for “Yesterday or the patient will die.”
I have been trying to come up with ways to prepare. I thought watching a lot of House would do it, but that’s more diagnostic than surgical; anyone can, like, think at a patient, right? That’s just puzzles and problems and throwing out an impressive word like aneurysm or Krohn’s epilepsy or thrombocytopenia once in a while and then prescribing a Tic Tac or administering a quick shot of testosterone. So that didn’t really help any.
I watched some old issues of er, but then I realized that’s emergency medicine and emergency surgery, and that’s probably a little more than I can handle at this point. That’s surgery you can’t prepare for, you know? You never know what could come through that door. Could be a concussion, or it could be an aortic embolism, or it could just be gas. And if it’s just gas, well, then I’d have no surgery to perform, and then I’d be sad.
Also, I’d want to choose what kind of surgery I would perform. I’ve been trying to decide. I thought at first about trying neurosurgery, because how cool would it be to touch a bit of frontal lobe and watch a patient’s leg twitch, but I think that novelty would wear off pretty quickly. I wouldn’t want to do any digestive surgeries or colonoscopies, either, because ewewew, or reproductive surgeries because I’d probably blush a lot. Given that I now have some experience with power tools, an amputation would probably be reasonable, but I worry that might be too easy.
I’m thinking heart surgery, and specifically of performing a heart transplant. Because then I could take one heart out and hold it while putting the other one in, and how cool would it be to hold a beating heart in your hand?
The answer, for the record, is totally rad.
***
I’m so excited by this idea that I don’t think I’m going to stop there. I think that I may make it my own personal November tradition to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the time for. Next year, I think I’m going to try National Pilot a Major Airline Flight Month, because everybody knows all you have to worry about is taking off and landing and the whole staying-in-the-air bit just kind of takes care of itself. Who knows what else I can come up with?
Are you quaking with anticipation yet? If you’re not, you should come up with your own National Something-To-Do Month.
National Be Someone’s Public Defender Month?
National Design a Building Month?
National Restore a Vintage Car Month?
National Symphony Composition Month?
The possibilities are endless!
***
Warning: The author is a trained professional. Please do not attempt at home.
No, it’s time to search the recesses of your hard drive for that one document that’s been languishing unfinished for so long, the one you promised yourself you would finish someday, when you had time. When you’re not dawdling about on Facebook and Twitter or making sure to keep up with every blog or following the exploits Kate plus eight sans Jon. You know the document I’m talking about. You think about it often: What if?
Everyone’s got one. Writers used to stick them in drawers, or trunks, and there they would remain, waiting for some attention, any attention.
So now it’s time to dust it off! It’s time to sign up on an Internet forum with lots of other people who all have Long Languished Projects, and it’s time to finally dedicate to those projects the time they so deserve.
A whole month!
That’s right: it’s National Novel Writing Month time. Are you quaking with anticipation?
I am. Or at least, I would be, except, here’s the thing: I’m a writer. I’ve been a writer since I was in sixth grade, when I read the end of Needful Things and simply knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that was what I wanted to do. Maybe even what I was Meant to do, if there is such a thing.
So I started doing it. I knew what I wanted to do. I was excited about it. So why wait?
I wrote half of a couple of novels in high school. They were crap.
I wrote a full couple of novels in college. They were crap, too.
I wrote a couple of novellas after college, while working in the City as a commercial producer, and then when I moved back home, while I was a substitute teacher. These, too, were crap.
I wrote a couple of novels while I was an editor. And a couple of screenplays. You guessed it: crap and more crap.
Thing was, at some point, while there was never anything actually good, there came a point where it was less crap. There came a point where the redeeming qualities outnumbered the horrifically hackneyed juvenilia I was setting down on the page.
No, really, I was. I swear to Christ that was what the first rejection letter I ever received called the sample I had sent. Then again, I was nineteen at the time, so it was probably a fair point. I was a hackneyed juvenile, after all.
After many, many years of writing and working, of applying ass to chair and setting down word after word every day, I eventually graduated from hackneyed juvenilia to competent-enough midlist fiction similar in spirit to a Timecop sequel. Again: swear to Christ. Again: rejection letter to prove it.
It took a long time. I focused on writing arguably to the exclusion of many other things; a lot of my friends have been married for several years already and have children or are planning to. My little brother married the year before I moved to Los Angeles to study writing at USC. My best friend is the first doctor injured troops see after they leave Afghanistan. I’m a second cousin, like, nine times over because all my cousins, including those younger than me, already have children. Through all those years, all that long time, I wrote every day. I wrote and rewrote novels and novellas, and eventually I even started to get actually good at it.
Now it’s National Novel Writing Month. Twitter is fast and furious with points to posts about plot and pacing (and alliteration, obvs), about how to Outline Now to Meet Your Goal! So far, more than 15,000 people have signed up to participate this year, and there’s still more than a week left; that number will probably quadruple over the next ten or so days.
I feel so left out. It’s a massive show of support for 15,000 people to write every day, to set down a little less than 2,000 words, but I already do that most days. I admit I somedays don’t reach that number—
“And somedays it don’t come easy, and somedays it don’t come hard. Somedays it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end.” (Meatloaf)—
But every day I try, and most days I succeed, and the days I don’t succeed I usually cover by writing a little more another day. Somedays I’ve managed 10,000. I’m not saying they’re all good words, mind you, although I am happy to report that more are good than bad anymore, and my first drafts require fewer rewrites than they used to.
So the whole sitting down to write for the month of November . . . I was planning to do that anyway.
In the can-do spirit of the season, however, I have come up with my own alternative to NaNoWriMo.
***
I call it National Surgery Performing Month, or, as such things go, NaSuPerMo, which means it even has a cooler abbrev.
See, when I was in high school, my goal was to go to med school, be a doctor, and write a book. No, really, it literally says that underneath my senior picture. When I won student of the month, I told the newspaper (because student of the month was a Very Big Deal in a Very Small Town) that I wanted to go to Harvard and be a heart surgeon.
We see how all that worked out for me.
But I feel positively empowered by this sense of possible accomplishment, and I think can harness all this terrific can-do-anything-including-write-that-novel-we-always-said-we-would-but-never-have energy into an endeavor like that.
Think about it: sure, doctors go to med school, but surgery is really just, like, a slice here and another there and then some sewing up after I’m done, right? I just built a whole mess of furniture—including a bookcase, a coffee table, a desk, and two beds—with my dad, so I learned how to use lots of power tools and cutting things, and how much more difficult than “Measure twice, cut once,” can surgery possibly be? I used to put together models—I mean like cars, not like Elle MacPherson—when I was a kid, so I’ve had plenty of practice at close range with fine motor skills.
And Hell, I was pre-med. I’ve been in bio labs. I’ve dissected fetal pigs and anesthetized amphibians. I’ve even literally skinned a cat, and then brought in a Dremel to crack its skull to get at its brain. I’ve worked with scalpels plenty of times and never cut anything I wasn’t supposed to—well, there was that one time, but she shouldn’t have put her finger in the way of my scalpel. Master at work, woman! I’ve even watched a bunch of surgeries, including a few cataract and arthroscopies but also one in which an orthopedic surgeon constructed the malformed hand of a three-year-old boy using skin from the pubic region for a graft because of consistencies in nerve endings and hair growth. All emphasis added because how seriously cool is that?
And I can sew. I used to be a Boy Scout. I’m an Eagle Scout, in fact, and my mother made me sew all my merit badges onto my sash. There were 21 of those. In the intervening years, I’ve replaced plenty of buttons. I’ve even darned a sock, which is even more complicated because you have to turn it inside out first to make an internal mend.
See? Internal mending. It’s perfect.
Finally, I’m loud, so I can urgently ask for forceps or a number-2 gauge scalpel or gauze with the best of them and make it sound like it’s really important by also including the word “stat,” which is Latin for “Yesterday or the patient will die.”
I have been trying to come up with ways to prepare. I thought watching a lot of House would do it, but that’s more diagnostic than surgical; anyone can, like, think at a patient, right? That’s just puzzles and problems and throwing out an impressive word like aneurysm or Krohn’s epilepsy or thrombocytopenia once in a while and then prescribing a Tic Tac or administering a quick shot of testosterone. So that didn’t really help any.
I watched some old issues of er, but then I realized that’s emergency medicine and emergency surgery, and that’s probably a little more than I can handle at this point. That’s surgery you can’t prepare for, you know? You never know what could come through that door. Could be a concussion, or it could be an aortic embolism, or it could just be gas. And if it’s just gas, well, then I’d have no surgery to perform, and then I’d be sad.
Also, I’d want to choose what kind of surgery I would perform. I’ve been trying to decide. I thought at first about trying neurosurgery, because how cool would it be to touch a bit of frontal lobe and watch a patient’s leg twitch, but I think that novelty would wear off pretty quickly. I wouldn’t want to do any digestive surgeries or colonoscopies, either, because ewewew, or reproductive surgeries because I’d probably blush a lot. Given that I now have some experience with power tools, an amputation would probably be reasonable, but I worry that might be too easy.
I’m thinking heart surgery, and specifically of performing a heart transplant. Because then I could take one heart out and hold it while putting the other one in, and how cool would it be to hold a beating heart in your hand?
The answer, for the record, is totally rad.
***
I’m so excited by this idea that I don’t think I’m going to stop there. I think that I may make it my own personal November tradition to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the time for. Next year, I think I’m going to try National Pilot a Major Airline Flight Month, because everybody knows all you have to worry about is taking off and landing and the whole staying-in-the-air bit just kind of takes care of itself. Who knows what else I can come up with?
Are you quaking with anticipation yet? If you’re not, you should come up with your own National Something-To-Do Month.
National Be Someone’s Public Defender Month?
National Design a Building Month?
National Restore a Vintage Car Month?
National Symphony Composition Month?
The possibilities are endless!
***
Warning: The author is a trained professional. Please do not attempt at home.
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Enjoyed the article, Will. I tried my hand at National Novel Writing Month this year. I’d never heard of it until last year. (I don’t get out much) I was unsuccessful in my attempt and, quite honestly, lasted a single day. I’m a slow writer. To pace myself at 2,000 words a day isn’t really possible. I can knock off that in a day no problem. I can knock off 8-9,000 words a day, just not everyday. Not consistently. By signing up, I sort of signed up for failure. I knew that ahead of time. I still proceeded.
I decided instead to do National Novel Writing Year. I feel that is more feasible for me, my personality. I made a promise to myself I would write at least 165 words a day everyday on my novel. Good words. At least 165. That way it stays concise and on the right path. Granted, I keep a hardback notebook with me for ideas that pop into my head, character outlines, etc.
At 165 words a day for 365 days, that’s just over 60,000 words, and I am a fan of the just over 200 pg. novel. It allows me to achieve a goal I probably wouldn’t reach otherwise since I also partake in National Play Basketball for Two Hours a Day Year, also known as NaPlBasTwHoDayYe.