During the month of November, if you feel so inclined, you can write a novel. National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo – pretty much equates to writing 50,000 or so words in 30 days. Which is a fine accomplishment for anyone who completes it. A stretch for most, a breeze for others.
The trick, though, is making sure you have a novel at the end of the month. 50K continuous words doesn’t necessarily mean you have a novel. It probably just means you have a big document. NaNoWriMo is good at doing one thing: showing the every man that a book can be written in the span of a month, and you really don’t have any excuse.
John Updike said in an interview that there weren’t any more serious writers. Everyone who writes does so as more of a hobby. As a result few think that writing should have any work put into it. Career writers – who work at the words like their careers depend on it – replaced by hobby writers who do it because they decide it’s fun. Updike died in 2009. Probably unrelated.
In my junior year of college I took a screenwriting class. It was one of those classes that everyone wanted to take but no one learned anything because the college didn’t want to have anything to do with the film or writing programs. Underfunded, apathetic instructors, lost bets. I did have a legitimate desire to be in the class; to learn the format and craft of the screenwriting process. But I sucked at it because my love affair with whiskey and percocet and generally-unattainable women I was having at the time made it rather difficult to do any kind of writing.
Like, not one single page of script. Not one line that a student director could even imagine placing a shot around. I managed a D in the class only because I managed to give halfway decent notes on other student’s scripts. When the semester ended I went home to my folks place for a few days and found myself entombed in their living room as four-foot snow drifts piled up out in the holiday snowstorm. No one was going anywhere and my parents house has been a notoriously dry one for all of my upbringing. With a clear-ish head and ridiculously bad cable playing in the background I banged out a 165 page screenplay over the span of 3 days in my fever of comparable sobriety. I called it “This is Not A Love Story”, I was listening to a lot of Public Image in those days.
At the start of the following semester I went to the screenwriting professor’s office and dropped a copy of the script in the center of his desk and begged for a higher grade. I had, after all, finished the assignment for the semester – does it matter if it’s a little late? It is, after all, the creative process!
He read it and gave me one note a week later: “This is the most narcissistic, self-absorbed, egotistical garbage I have ever read in my entire career. B+” A week later he walked off campus, allegedly in the middle of class. Probably unrelated.
I had a friend read it. Her only note: “Do the characters do anything other than fuck in this movie?”
Three days of writing, no rewrite, and it shows. I’m sure I’ve got a copy of it around here somewhere.
The point? Maybe this: words, literature, stories, characters, plots – all the things that make up a book or a movie – are really like a decent wine, bourbon, cigar, cheese. It’s never very good right out of the gate. If they’re going to be really good, they have to rot. Decay. They need to be left out in the rain, allowed to rust and swell and break. They need time to erode down and develop a natural feel.
J.A. Jance and Janet Evanovich each have something like 40 or 50 novels to their name. A new one comes out every six months or so. Jonathan Safran Froer is winning international peace prizes for his work – he’s got, what? Three books? Franzen is the middle-aged grump who has worked his whole life for the sum total of four novels. David Foster Wallace let his work kill him – literally.
I do wish every writer well, especially when it comes to NaNoWriMo. But when the month is said and done, don’t rush your work to press. Let it live on the back porch until spring, give it another once over, tune up the glaring weak spots and then send me a copy.
