"So, Mitch," Cory asked, "what are you up to?"
Mitch looked thoughtful for a minute and then said, "Seventeen thousand."
Oakland, California-based freelancer Chris Baty always said he was going to write a novel 'someday.' But in the fall of 1999, he decided to jettison the excuses that had kept that 'someday' at a comfortable arm's length. He declared November to be 'National Novel Writing Month' and enlisted twenty-one of his friends, all with the same seemingly unattainable goal: to write a 50,000-word novel in a month.
Six of the participants finished that year. They told their friends, who told their friends, who told a bunch of random strangers. The following year, 140 people got involved. National Novel Writing Month--NaNoWriMo or just NaNo, as it's come to be called--has grown astronomically every year since then. In 2003, the event's fifth anniversary, more than 22,000 people, spread across every populated continent, signed up to take part in what has to be the world's largest experiment in voluntary mass psychosis.
This is not a contest. There is no prize for those who cross the 50,000-word line, no penalty for those who do not. Hokey as it may sound, writing itself becomes the prize--the discipline of sitting down and doing the work every day; the warmth of the creative spark bursting into flame; the pride of knowing that you have done a thing which seemed undoable.
The camaraderie is a big bonus, too. When outsiders think that merely attempting a thing is proof of insanity, insiders band together pretty quickly. We celebrate with each other over good days, commiserate over bad, and generally cheer, coax, and haul each other forward--another half hour of writing when we thought we had no more time; another five pages where we were sure we had no more words.
Everyone going crazy simultaneously is pretty fun, too. We alienate our loved one through single-minded devotion to 'the novel.' We go for days without sleep. We answer every question posed to us--regardless of whether it has anything to do with NaNo--not with words, but with word counts. And from time to time as the month progresses, we will gather in bars, coffee shops, and living rooms around the world, pretending to write but really staring, glassy-eyed, into space, wondering what the hell we were on when we agreed to this.
This is my second year participating in NaNo. Last year I chronicled the fast-paced and frivolous adventures of a lesbian superhero duo. This year I embarked on an epic fantasy adventure whose end seems farther away the more I write. I kept a journal throughout the month, thinking I could use the entries to write a scathingly witty and charmingly self-effacing account of the event. Looking at the journal in December, I realized that my best course of action was to let the scathingly witty and charmingly self-effacing entries speak for themselves.
Saturday, 11/1; 2573 words: If I keep up this pace, I can be done by the 20th. Of course, the odds of me keeping up pace are roughly equal to the odds of getting struck by lightning twice on the same day I win the lottery.
Sunday 11/2; 5232 words: I have the best word count killer. The main character sings! It's great. Stuck? Low on words? Daneen breaks into song. It's like Rodgers and Hammerstein gone horridly awry. And of course there are multiple repetitions of the chorus.
Tuesday, 11/4; 10,308 words: I'm 2000 words ahead. How am I supposed to write an essay about how NaNo made me crazy if I'm a whole day ahead? I mentioned that to Laurie, and she said, "Eli, you already are crazy, just for doing this."
Wednesday, 11/5; 12,312: My friend Scott used to say, "Communism worked great until the morning the guy woke up and said, 'I don't want to push the wheelbarrow today.'" I really didn't want to push the wheelbarrow today.
Thursday, 11/6; 14,714: Beth's main character woke her up at 6:30 this morning and demanded that she 'write this down.' Frankee wrote more than 7,000 words today and isn't convinced that any of them are actually connected to the plot of the novel.
Sunday 11/9; 21,241: Zan's at 24,000. We hate her. She has a NaNo support team that cooks for her almost every day. We hate her more. The character who was supposed to be my primary villain is turning out to be neither primary nor villainous, so I traded him for a third-round draft pick and a bad guy to be named later.
Tuesday, 11/11; 26,309: I'm taking a submachine gun to the top of a clock tower. I'm cutting off my ear and giving it to my mailman. I'm chucking this novel into the Mississippi and never writing another word ever again. And it's all your fault, Chapter 2!
Wednesday, 11/12; 27,130: HAH! Victory is mine! Chapter 2 is dead! And it only took thirty pages.
Thursday, 11/13; 29,232: Because so many of my friends are writers, I forget how I must sound to non-writers. Martin asked me how NaNo's going. I launched into a detailed recounting of how Tannismir turned out far more pathetic than malicious, how Sof refuses to show up, and how I worry that one of the other major characters won't even make it into the 50,000. He looked truly horrified.
Friday, 11/14; 31,288: I love Chapter 3. And do you know why I love Chapter 3? BECAUSE IT'S NOT CHAPTER 2!
Saturday, 11/15; 31,288: The Twin Cities NaNos' halfway gathering was today at Cahoots. The people who are behind on word count spent the entire time talking about being behind; the people who are ahead didn't say much of anything. They spent all their time blinking at the coffee shop's dim lighting like vampires caught outside at sunrise.
Sunday, 11/16; 33,931: In these frenzied and chaotic times, what sustains me is my circle of friends. Actually, in these frenzied and chaotic times, what sustains me is knowing that my circle of friends is going crazy far faster than I am. Cory's novel is turning into a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole, where every plot thread resolved generates two more. Wendy's sig.line on the forum reads only, "Can't talk. Must write." And francis is halfway through writing a murder mystery and has no idea who the killer is.
Tuesday, 11/18; 37,981: Wheelbarrow day.
Wednesday 11/19; 40,228: Wheelbarrow day.
Thursday, 11/20; 41,850: Wheelbarrow day.
Friday, 11/21; 43,768: The flaw inherent in using Daneen's songs as word-count killers? If she sings a song, I have to write a song. It's not pretty. But Zan is done. Shrew. I mean...congratulations, Zan!
Saturday, 11/22; 45,222: Sarah has verrrry many words left to write. 49k, to be exact. In a week.
Monday, 11/24; 50,742: HUZZAH! 50k, baby! Look at it. Revel in it. Luuuuurve it. The End! Well, no. I may have written my 50,000, but 'THE END' taunts me from a far, far distant horizon. But still! Done done done! Now for a victory dance around the living room.
On December 7, the Twin Cities' area NaNos gathered for the "Thank God It's Over" party. We sat around talking about our novels--did you reach 50,000? Did the book turn out the way you expected? What are you going to do with it now (answers range from finishing with an eye to eventual publication to burying them deep in the back yard and never thinking about them again)? What disrupted routines can you resume now that November is over?
But no one talked about the actual process of writing that we'd just been through. We didn't confess to living off chocolate-covered espresso beans and TV dinners for a month. We didn't admit to the towering stacks of dishes and laundry that have gone neglected since October. And we certainly didn't delve into the hours of blind panic that choked us as we stared down that blinking cursor and contemplated the depths of our own talentlessness. Like soldiers returning from a devastating battle, we agreed, by tacit consensus, not to force each other to relive the horrors of combat. It was enough to know that the enemy was vanquished.
Hidden in corners of the house, while the party swirled around them, novelists in clumps of twos and threes started the same conversation: "Next year I'm going to do that instead of this." "Next year I'm setting a daily quota and, damn it, I'm going to stick to it." "Next year, my novel is going to start like this...."
We National Novel Writing Month participants drive ourselves to madness and beyond. We plunge ourselves into the depths of self-doubt and despair. We commit desperate acts of literature.
And we can't wait to do it again.
© 2003 by Eli Jean Weintraub. All rights reserved.