FEATURE: I Am Writing a 50,000-Word Novel in 30 Days

Like many journalists, I am a frustrated novelist. (I'm also a frustrated screenwriter and comicbook writer, but that's another story.) My grand ambitions to write the Great American Novel (or, barring that, the Great Las Vegan Novel) have been thwarted thus far by things like school, work and laziness. I've written a few short stories and many, many unfinished works, including a "novel" that I've been working on for 10 years. That particular piece is a mutated short story; when I got to a sticking point and might otherwise have given up, I threw in a plot twist and kept right on going. Since then I've come back to it whenever I feel the need to flex my creative muscles, throwing in plot twists any time I get stuck. It's now got aliens, time travel, government conspiracies and the undead. I'm not quite sure where it's going.

Last year, a couple of friends participated in National Novel Writing Month, an idea started by San Franciscan Chris Baty in 1999 to motivate himself and a few others to finally work on their own novels. The event has grown from the initial 20 participants to more than 20,000 this year. The concept is simple: During the month of November, write a 50,000-word novel. You start at midnight on the first and finish at midnight on the 30th. Or, at least, theoretically you do: Only about 20 percent make it to the end. This seemed like the perfect motivating tool for me. At school and at work, I've gotten plenty of writing done thanks to the magic of the deadline. If the editor says he needs 1,000 words on local music by Monday, then I write 1,000 words on local music by Monday. (OK, sometimes Tuesday.)

I signed up (at www.nanowrimo.org) with a very vague plan of what I would spend the next month doing. NaNo (as it's known) allows for notes and outlines before the month begins but no actual writing. Since I've never been a note-taker or outline-maker, I had only my high concept to guide me. My novel was to be a science-fiction detective story set in Las Vegas in the future. Raymond Chandler meets William Gibson. I wanted to base it on a short story I had written about a year ago—for a "24-Hour Fictions" feature in the Weekly (December 12,2002)—but since I couldn't use the actual text, I'd have to rewrite it and go from there. In retrospect, this was a very poor way to start. I should have made notes and an outline and started with a fresh concept. But that's all right; NaNo is a learning experience.

Although I only had a sketchy plan for my actual story, I had a solid plan for how to begin. Since November 1 was a Saturday, I could start right in on my novel at midnight on Friday night. I would get in several hours' worth of writing before heading to the first meeting of local NaNos Saturday afternoon at a nearby Starbucks. I'd be way ahead of everyone else.

Of course, at midnight on Friday, I was at a friend's house for a Halloween party and in no mood to begin novelling. Some start. By the time I got home, at nearly two, I was too tired to write. As I'd learn later in the month, "too tired to write" was never a valid excuse.

The next day I went to the meeting having written exactly zero words. I wasn't sure how many people would show up, given the notorious, shall we say, nonliterary reputation of Las Vegas. I was prepared for novel-writing to be a lonely experience, although part of the stated purpose of NaNo is to meet fellow creative types. To my surprise, Vegas Municipal Liaison Amber had managed to gather 10 aspiring novelists at Starbucks to discuss our impending creative adventure.

Amber herself was a NaNo veteran, having written 66,000 words the previous November, and had an extensive outline for her new novel, a fantasy/romance story she planned to write by hand. A wife and mother of two with a full-time job as a medical transcriptionist, Amber was the most dedicated NaNo I met. She came armed with goodies for everyone, including pens, pads, white-out and the most important writing tool, chocolate.

The other people at the meeting ranged from a woman in her 60s who was writing a novel set in an addiction-recovery center to a girl who had just moved from Australia to another wife and mother who was writing an adaptation of a Celtic poem. It was a predominantly female, twentysomething group. There was plenty of energy and excitement going around as people discussed their plots, their characters, their planned literary devices. Barb, writing the Celtic adaptation, said she'd throw in a sex scene whenever things got slow. Van, writing about gay love within a Beatles cover band, encouraged us all to add gay characters to our story.

"There's this thing on the message board where you're supposed to put in a Chinese man who says 'Nurf,'" Barb mentioned.

"Can he be gay?" Van asked.

Thus was issued a challenge to include the gay Chinese man who says "Nurf" in each story. This was the kind of camaraderie I was hoping for; a social experience as well as a creative one. Barb even suggested that she might have a sleepover/writing session at her house in a couple of weeks.

I left the meeting feeling excited, like the month was full of possibilities. It would be easy, really: All I had to do was write 1,667 words a day for the next 30 days. Of course, my unfinished novel was 17,511 words long, which meant I'd only written a little more than 1,667 words a year on that one. Still, there was no pressure to come up with brilliance. NaNo stresses quantity, not quality. All I needed was a little self-discipline.

Which I clearly didn't have, since I didn't start writing until around 10 o'clock that night, after spending time at the Las Vegas Comic-Con, going grocery shopping and watching a movie. I arranged myself for maximum comfort in front of my computer, which sits on a card-table that serves as a desk. I opened a new document. I changed the font size and hit tab. I was ready to start.

Then I checked my e-mail, played some computer solitaire, browsed the forums on the NaNo website and read over my initial short story. I thought about how to rewrite it, then started with a different scene instead:
"Las Vegas is a cesspool," the guy said to me, puffing on a cigarette.

As I wrote, I thought,
I can do this. I can write this story.

First day's word count: 1,012 words.

At first, things went really well. I didn't write 1,667 words a day, but on the second and fifth days I wrote more than that, which made up for other days when I wrote less. I learned valuable lessons like: Always spell out numerals. "All right" and "a lot" are two words each. I named a strip club in my story the "Kittykat Klub" (klever, no?) and then renamed it the "Kitty Kat Klub"—an extra word each time I mentioned it.

Since I had no idea where my story was going, I threw in plot elements and characters with little thought about how they would tie together. I was writing a detective novel in which I didn't know what the mystery was or how to solve it. This didn't bother me; I kept thinking back to my older story, in which I'd just throw in a resurrection or a time paradox if I didn't know what was happening next.

Amber had set a goal of 10,000 words for our second weekly meeting, and I showed up having gotten to 9,249 the night before. I was fewer than 800 words behind, and it felt good. But the experience was already taking its toll on others. Only four of the 10 people from the previous week showed up, plus one new person. Amber was the only one completely on track, but the rest of us were close enough that it felt like we might really make it. Peter, the new guy, was writing a fantasy novel based on a dream he'd had. He'd started a few days late but didn't have anything else to do except write, so he was confident he could finish.

My confidence was fading. After the rush of the first week, the thrill of throwing in anything that came to mind, I started to realize that my novel would need something resembling coherence, especially if the main character was going to solve the mystery at the end. All those exciting elements that I had thrown in at the beginning had to fit together somehow. I started making allowances for things possibly not making sense. I established that my main character wasn't a great detective, and didn't quite know what was going on. Whenever I threw in something that didn't fit with what I'd already written, the main character would comment that this new bit of information didn't fit with what he'd already learned.

As the writing grew more difficult, my motivation declined. At first, even if I only had an hour to work, I'd be really productive during that hour. Now, even when I took a whole day to "write," I'd find an excuse to do anything other than face the plot that made increasingly less sense. In the second-week newsletter from the site, Baty talked about this very thing, and promised that once the hurdle of Week 2 passed, we would have figured out our plots and it would be smooth sailing from there.

I didn't believe him.

How can I kill the world?

Encounters with Wolves—Do's/Don'ts?

Sexually suggestive names for musical instruments.

What are hedgehogs?

Blaming your characters for your own mistakes.

Can moose not walk down stairs?

Do elves wear socks?

What are good dog mannerisms for a young talking dog?

Do people get married in heaven?

Which bones would make good toothpicks?

Everyone in town is dead. Where are you shopping?

Umm … strange illness thingy?

Blowing Up The Moon.

What's inside your belly button?

Anyone know something about hats?

Grits.

I need a few Chinese obscenities.

Butterflies are like snakes, right?

Quick! How can I cause the downfall of modern civilization?

Death via pee-holding?

The wrong way to have gay sex.

WHAT IS IOWA LIKE????

Prague—where is it?

Do sheep eat tomatoes?

How do you open your front door?

Medical people, please critique my apocalyptic virus.

As time went on, I got farther and farther behind. On Days 13 and 18 I wrote nothing. Nothing! Yet somehow it all still seemed possible, as dreams of selling the undoubtedly brilliant final product to a prestigious publisher continued to dance in my head. (Three past NaNo winners have sold novels to big publishing houses.) This entry from my online journal on November 13 (a day when, remember, I wrote nothing) is particularly telling: "Even though I'm behind where I should be, I think I might be able to catch up." Such calm, innocent certainty.

By the third week's meeting, our ranks had dwindled to four. Only Amber, Peter the new guy and Jess, who lived in Boulder City, continued to show up. A certain other journalist had written an article in a local publication condemning NaNo, so we discussed how wrong he was. Amber planned to self-publish her 2002 NaNo novel, which she had spent the last year polishing. Both Jess and Peter just wanted to finish, unsure of what they would do with the result, or even if they'd write anything else. But we were all excited to write. We were happy to be doing something for ourselves, having a good time creating for the sake of creation. This writer, himself a published novelist, had complained that NaNo mocked the writing process and the real effort that he and other professionals put into their novel-writing. It was a position a few other people had put forward in the past, as I learned from the NaNo forums.

It was, of course, ridiculous, the product of taking fiction-writing much too seriously. Do athletes discourage pick-up basketball games because they mock "real" athletes? Should we tell amateur painters to stop with the watercolor landscapes because it's offensive to "real" artists? Of course not. Amber, especially, was upset. She even found this writer's books in the bookstore where we were meeting and read some pages aloud. At that point we did mock the "real" novelist.

I found myself sleeping less and less and still ending the day not nearly far enough along. I did frantic recalculations, imagining that somehow if I only could write 2,200 words a day or something like that, I would be able to finish. Amber and Peter were moving swiftly along, and I had to reassure myself by imagining that their novels must be utter crap. Mine might not be long enough, but it was clearly brilliant.

By the time Week 4 rolled around, I knew I wasn't going to finish. I didn't even pass the halfway mark until November 26. The plot twists kept piling up and the ways to explain them became more and more farfetched. I started worrying that the story was going to end before I could reach 50,000 words, so two days before the end of the month, I killed an important character, the woman who had hired the detective at the beginning. It was an act of sheer desperation. This will motivate the action in the second half of the book, I thought. Ha! Second half of the book? Who was I kidding?

Thanksgiving is a notoriously rocky time for NaNos, what with all the family gatherings and football games to distract you from novel-writing. Once I admitted to my friends and family that finishing the novel was unlikely, they all tried to convince me to leave my apartment and join social gatherings. It didn't take much for them to succeed. I even allowed myself several days of sleeping in.

I kept going to the end, though, even if I was writing only a few hundred words a day. Sadly, I was unable to fit in the gay Chinese man who says "Nurf." I typed my final word a little before midnight on November 30, and entered my final word count on the website before the deadline: 27,351. A little more than half. Looking through the list of writers, I found that eight Las Vegans had finished. Of the people who hadn't, only two had a higher word count than I did. Most hadn't posted any word counts at all, or had stalled before reaching five figures. It was small comfort, but I took what I could get.

I wouldn't get a certificate for "winning," but I had accomplished something significant anyway. I had proven to myself that I could make time for creative writing in my busy life and had reawakened my desire to do so. I had produced the longest piece of writing I'd ever composed—longer than my 10-year-old novel and just barely longer than the screenplay I wrote a couple of years ago. That wasn't something to scoff at. I fully intend to finish the novel, plot holes and all, although I may not get back to it until after the holidays, and I'm not going to try to get it done in a month. If I make it by March, I can participate in National Novel Editing Month.

On December 2, I'm sitting in Buffalo Wild Wings with Amber, Peter and Amber's family. This is the "Thank God It's Over" party that in other cities has dozens of attendees. Here it's just me, the loser, and two of our city's winners. Neither of whom, I should mention, has actually finished. Peter estimates he'll need another 10,000 words to wrap his story up. Amber, even with more than 60,000 words before the deadline, has bits of her outline yet to cover.

The mood is light, although we're disappointed that more people haven't shown up. Amber's two small kids fidget in their seats as Peter, about to start work as a substitute teacher now that NaNo is behind him, keeps them entertained. Amber's husband looks like he embodies "Thank God It's Over," no longer to be questioned by his wife over whether certain plot developments work or what certain characters should say to one another.

I look over at Amber and Peter and the beauty of NaNo hits me: These two unassuming, normal-looking people are novelists. Everyone else here, eating their chicken wings, they have no idea what that's like. I feel jealous; if only I were a novelist, too.

There's always next year.