I’m writing a book - two of them in fact. I’ll be writing one this month, in October and a completely different one for the month of November. Barring a very vague outline that I have semi-stored in the murky depths of my own gray matter, I really have no idea what these books are going to be about.
I have no characters. I have no plot.
The November book will be about a hunt. The October book, the one I started this morning, will deal broadly with the themes of terror (although it won’t be a horror or terror story), persecution and, if time permits, redemption. Although at this point I’m beginning to think redemption may be optional.
Madness, I’m sure you’re all thinking at this point. You’re going to write two books in two months? What’s up with that? What kind of masochist are you?
Well, to properly answer that question I have to go back to a couple days ago, when my wife asked me if I had ever heard of Na No Wri Mo.
“Na No what?” I asked, puzzled.
“Yes,” she explained. “The month of November is National Novel Writing Month. They have an annual contest, where writers try to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. They’re motto is, ‘no plot, no problem.’
“Is there a cash prize?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But if you participated in something like this it wouldn’t look bad on your resume. I think it would be a cool notch in your belt.”
I asked her to read me some more details. The gist is simply this: to hell with editing, to hell with planning, just write. Work begins on Nov. 1, when Na No users get a “word count” block in their online accounts. Just write and see what comes of it.
I did a quick Google search and discovered that one of the all-time great novels in American Literature, The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, only had a word count of around 37,000 words. While Hemingway isn’t my favorite writer, and while Old Man and the Sea isn’t my favorite book in the world, (he did win a Nobel Prize for it) I have always enjoyed it because of its simplicity.
And now, after coming off about a month-long hiatus from writing, I realized this was sort of my problem. It was not writer’s block per say. But (as I sought agents and publishers for my first completed novel) I got to a point where synopsis writing, style, editing, plotting and planning had become stumbling blocks of sorts - sadder yet, somewhere in the midst of all that, the importance of just “the story itself” had become completely and totally lost.
As my wife continued to read off the rules of the contest, I realized that’s what I yearned for the most - a return to simplicity.
“Where did you hear about this?” I asked her.
“A couple of our Plurk buddies were posting about it,” she replied.
That was two days ago. After spending the day trying to activate my Na No online account - their server crashed from overload, I began to get antsy. Ideas were spinning around in my head and I wanted to write. Problem is, contest doesn’t begin until November 1. Rules of the contest say, you’re not supposed to begin writing anything really until November 1.
So I came up with an idea. I figured, “hey, if I’m going to be writing a whole book in November, why not try a dry run, and write another, wholly different book for the Month of October, just to get myself into the swing of things.
So, here I am.
I plan post daily updates here on my site, along with excerpts of what I get written each day. Catch y’all on the flip side…
