Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Luddite In The Meatlocker

Yesterday I sat in on a writing group which had convened for NaNoWriMo - or National Novel Writing Month. It took place in a library at CalTech. A small, freezing room full of scientific journals at the end of a hallway cramped with cold storage lockers and cabinets full of empty beakers. I loved it. Froze my fingers off, but I loved it (though it was so cold, the guy across from me asked, "What is this? NaNoGitMo?")

We started at ten and wrote until two, with a couple of breaks to step outside and warm up. They also kept track of everyone's "word count" and awarded various prizes for Most Words In An Hour, Fewest Words In An Hour, and the very special prize, made up on the spot, of Negative Word Count. The last was awarded to a guy who forgot to save his first couple of pages.

The awards were a nice way to break up the day. I didn't mind the interruption like I thought I would. The whole energy of writing in a group of people who are just writing to have fun and reach 50K words in a month is pretty infectious (Hunter Thompson once said that writing is like sex, in that it's only fun for amateurs - he was only half joking, I think). There is a lot of criticism of NaNo for the "gamification of novel writing" (actual fucking quote), but I think it's wonderful - people are writing books! What could possibly be wrong with that? Yes, yes, agents and publishers are less than a month away from being swamped with sloppy, unedited books which are all inexplicably only 200 pages long, but so what? That's what slush piles are for. On the other end of those books are happy people who have fulfilled a dream. May the Great Scribendu bless them and keep them.

I was an oddity in that room, being the only one not writing on a computer. I was immediately branded a Luddite, and given a free sticker. But what can I say - the first draft for me must be physically exorcised with pen and paper. The computer is for the later, refined version. Plus it felt fun making all those scratchy-scratch sounds on my legal pad while everyone else was gently plinking away on their keyboards.

All said, I had a blast. This idea of a daily word count is working, because if I'm going to get anything done, it has to be measurable. This is a concept from the fitness world which I have come to believe in wholeheartedly. 1,667 is the magic fucking number today and everyday until this nightmare is in the can. Follow it up with some heavy December editing, some last minute character revisions, a little bit of Old Negro Wisdom, and we'll have ourselves a Novel!

3 comments:

savannah said...

were you using a fountain pen by any chance? ;)

captain chaos said...

So that's why you haven't been answering your phone, your email, your texts, the smoke signals, the undead zombie carrier pigeon, or the adult "girl scouts" I've been sending you!

Anonymous said...

Thomas Mann sat down in the morning and wrote until midday. Sometimes it was not much. But at least one page.