Since I’m too caught up in Preeta Samarasan’s lyrical narrative to be inspired enough to write my own (much less lyrical) ones, an advertisement seems to be a good bet.
It’s November, and so National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is back, tantalising writers with the idea that they should, can, must complete a 50,000 word manuscript in 30 days. That roughly 175-pages in a month, or almost 6 pages a day. It doesn’t sound like much, but…if you are anything like me, where you cross out half of the passages that you write, before you even get a full page – six pages is an awfully long distance. To do it daily can be like climbing Mount Everest.
NaNoWriMo works on the principle that you need to write mountains of crap to produce a tiny mound of gold (“gold” being Natalie Goldberg’s expression for good writing). In other words, you’d perhaps get 20 usable pages out of the 175 – but you needed to write the 175 anyway to arrive at that 20. (I try to imagine Preeta writing “crap” but fail – however, she did mention in a recent author’s event that her orginal manuscript was three times the length of this one, so there you go – it’s easier to cut down on material rather than not have enough to work with in the first place).
I entered the NaNoWriMo marathon about five years back, and exhaustedly crossed the finish line at just a couple of hundred words over 50,000. See Ming’s Word Up! was administrating then, and I remember frantic emails before each milestone. The administration is a lot easier now – with just the finish line submission to be made, and to a centralised administrator which will then verify the word count.
At any rate, the exercise was a good stamina-building exercise for writers, particularly ones like me, who delete more than I write, regret the deletions, undo the erasures, get frustrated, and then wonder if I should delete everything and start over (perfectionism or procrastination, take your pick). With NaNoWriMo, and each installment logged, I couldn’t undo, nor backtrack, and had to find a way out of the story I had written my characters in, somehow.
The story’s gone – it was in an old laptop whose hard drive conked out before I could backup the contents. I remember bits and pieces of the narrative – it was excruciatingly bad (though with good grammar, of course) – but nonetheless, I have been slowly building on remnants of the tale since that time, adding layers and dimensions from – well, where else? – The Real World. If writers are scientists and story scenarios are hypothesis, then I”d say more than half have been proven correct, though quite unfortunately, in some cases.
That exhausting, painful, extraction of Story from Goodness Knows Where, at the expense of a Normal Life, has made me shy away from subsequent NaNoWriMos. But if you are ready, willing and able – go for it. Last year, 15% of the 100k participants worldwide completed the marathon. So, you can feel proud if you complete the 50k words, and console yourself if you don’t. Either way, you’ll end up with a lot more rubbishy narrative than when you started, which you can then mine and sieve, for the glinting threads of – yes, there’s actually no better word for it – gold.
Filed under: Personal Note, Writing , NaNoWriMo08, Writing
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