Think About It: Up to the Challenge
Well, friends, another Halloween has come and gone. The candy has all been given out (and in most cases, devoured), the costumes are back in the closet, and people go back to staring at you funny if you walk around in a cape and mask instead of talking abuot how cute you are. I found this out the hard way. so with November staring us in the face, what can we do to get over the post-Halloween blues? Well, I don't know about you guys, but i'm going to do the same thing I've done for the last two years. I'm writing a novel.
November, my friends, is National Novel Writing Month, an annual 30-day period in which hundreds of thousands of writers -- professional, aspiring and amateur alike -- lose our collective minds and attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in one month. The event began in 1999 with a group of 21 people in California. In 2006, over 79,000 people around the world took the challenge, and over 13,000 of them met the 50,000-word benchmark, myself included. I first NaNoed (when 79,000 writers do something at the same time, they are allowed to turn it into a verb) in 2005, when I wrote A Long November, a short novel that took my love of Christmas and showed what would happen if you shoved it down the throat of someone who hates it. (I really like A Long November, and I may attempt to turn it into a podcast novel in time for this year's Christmas season. But more on that later.) Last year I attempted a post-Katrina potboiler I called The Book of Lisimba, but although I reached the 50,000-word limit, I was never really satisfied with the book. I later realized that it was actually the first section of a longer, more ambitious story that I thus far have not attempted.
Yesterday, November 1, was the starting fun. I leapt out of bed first thing in the morning, happy and energetic, excited to leap into the deep end of Microsoft Word and start NaNoing. Yes, friends, I leapt right out of bed... and promptly fell back down, stricken with some sort of sinus congestion that was so bad that I got dizzy every time I attempted to open my eyes and move my head at the same time. I called in sick and went back to bed, eventually waking up at 10 o'clock, horrified that I had wasted nearly half the day that I could have been using to write. (Or, alternately, to teach 9th grade students, as that is technically what I get a paycheck for.) Feeling a bit better, I pulled my trusty laptop up to my face and started to type.
This is what came out:
Skip had never realized how sweet the air of Ezzix was until he accepted he was breathing it perhaps for the last time. It wasn’t sweet in a metaphorical sense, either, not in the way that his grandfather often talked about the sweetness in the town before the car factory came to town and started belching smoke into the air. Each breath of Ezzix air carried on it a different sweet fragrance - honeysuckle with one breath, then a hint of peppermint, then a warm cake baking in the oven. He stood by the familiar Wisdom Well, ready to ride down the bucket he was almost too big for, and he wondered once again how he had never noticed the changing aroma before. In a place of so much magic, this small one had somehow escaped him. He took one last breath - pumpkin pie with whipped cream - climbed into the bucket, and began his descent.
Maybe it ain't Shakespeare, but it's at least better than Dan Brown, and more historically accurate at that. (I can't wait to see how many people I tick off with that one.)
When you're trying to tackle 50,000 words in a month (that's a daily average of 1,667 for those of you -- like myself -- who had to ask a math teacher), you find yourself writing whenever you can find the time, including the occasional effort in a public place: the DMV, coffee shops, in those precious seconds before the light turns green again. Inevitably, people are going to ask what you're doing. By the third time today someone in the teacher's lounge asked me what I was taking notes on, I considered just having cards printed with a brief synopsis of the NaNoWriMo project to hand out whenever necessary.
My students have also gotten wind of the challenge, but it's harder to explain to them than the teachers. Ninth graders -- at least my ninth graders -- have trouble grasping the idea of doing anything hard without a guarantee of reward. The first thing any of them seem to ask when I explain to them the concept is, "what do you get if you win." Somehow the idea of "bragging rights" doesn't register with them, even though I've heard of many of them doing far more foolish things for far stupider reasons, often involving placing alternative fuels in lawnmower engines.
I try to put it in terms that they understand. "Haven't you ever done anything just to prove that you can?" I ask. A lot more of them relate to that idea, again, in terms of lawnmowers. "It's a challenge. You don't win anything. It's about setting a goal for yourself, struggling, and meeting it. Doesn't that idea appeal to any of you?"
This is the part where most of them just blink at me and ask if we can get back to talking about pronouns.
Still, I'd like to think that sooner or later one or two of them will understand the appeal of going after that kind of thrill, that joy that can only come from accomplishing something. And for it to be truly thrilling, you can't be accomplishing it for the sake of reward or prizes or money, but for the ability to stand on your own two feet and say I did it. That's an amazing feeling.
Of course, if someone were to decide to give you large quantities of money to publish what you did, well, it'd be kind of stupid to say "No."
Blake M. Petit is going to conquer this mountain if it kills him. He's also going to try to use up all of his cliches like "conquer this mountain" here at Think About It Central to keep them the hell out of his novel. Contact him with comments or suggestions at BlakePT@cox.net.
November, my friends, is National Novel Writing Month, an annual 30-day period in which hundreds of thousands of writers -- professional, aspiring and amateur alike -- lose our collective minds and attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in one month. The event began in 1999 with a group of 21 people in California. In 2006, over 79,000 people around the world took the challenge, and over 13,000 of them met the 50,000-word benchmark, myself included. I first NaNoed (when 79,000 writers do something at the same time, they are allowed to turn it into a verb) in 2005, when I wrote A Long November, a short novel that took my love of Christmas and showed what would happen if you shoved it down the throat of someone who hates it. (I really like A Long November, and I may attempt to turn it into a podcast novel in time for this year's Christmas season. But more on that later.) Last year I attempted a post-Katrina potboiler I called The Book of Lisimba, but although I reached the 50,000-word limit, I was never really satisfied with the book. I later realized that it was actually the first section of a longer, more ambitious story that I thus far have not attempted.
Yesterday, November 1, was the starting fun. I leapt out of bed first thing in the morning, happy and energetic, excited to leap into the deep end of Microsoft Word and start NaNoing. Yes, friends, I leapt right out of bed... and promptly fell back down, stricken with some sort of sinus congestion that was so bad that I got dizzy every time I attempted to open my eyes and move my head at the same time. I called in sick and went back to bed, eventually waking up at 10 o'clock, horrified that I had wasted nearly half the day that I could have been using to write. (Or, alternately, to teach 9th grade students, as that is technically what I get a paycheck for.) Feeling a bit better, I pulled my trusty laptop up to my face and started to type.
This is what came out:
Skip had never realized how sweet the air of Ezzix was until he accepted he was breathing it perhaps for the last time. It wasn’t sweet in a metaphorical sense, either, not in the way that his grandfather often talked about the sweetness in the town before the car factory came to town and started belching smoke into the air. Each breath of Ezzix air carried on it a different sweet fragrance - honeysuckle with one breath, then a hint of peppermint, then a warm cake baking in the oven. He stood by the familiar Wisdom Well, ready to ride down the bucket he was almost too big for, and he wondered once again how he had never noticed the changing aroma before. In a place of so much magic, this small one had somehow escaped him. He took one last breath - pumpkin pie with whipped cream - climbed into the bucket, and began his descent.
Maybe it ain't Shakespeare, but it's at least better than Dan Brown, and more historically accurate at that. (I can't wait to see how many people I tick off with that one.)
When you're trying to tackle 50,000 words in a month (that's a daily average of 1,667 for those of you -- like myself -- who had to ask a math teacher), you find yourself writing whenever you can find the time, including the occasional effort in a public place: the DMV, coffee shops, in those precious seconds before the light turns green again. Inevitably, people are going to ask what you're doing. By the third time today someone in the teacher's lounge asked me what I was taking notes on, I considered just having cards printed with a brief synopsis of the NaNoWriMo project to hand out whenever necessary.
My students have also gotten wind of the challenge, but it's harder to explain to them than the teachers. Ninth graders -- at least my ninth graders -- have trouble grasping the idea of doing anything hard without a guarantee of reward. The first thing any of them seem to ask when I explain to them the concept is, "what do you get if you win." Somehow the idea of "bragging rights" doesn't register with them, even though I've heard of many of them doing far more foolish things for far stupider reasons, often involving placing alternative fuels in lawnmower engines.
I try to put it in terms that they understand. "Haven't you ever done anything just to prove that you can?" I ask. A lot more of them relate to that idea, again, in terms of lawnmowers. "It's a challenge. You don't win anything. It's about setting a goal for yourself, struggling, and meeting it. Doesn't that idea appeal to any of you?"
This is the part where most of them just blink at me and ask if we can get back to talking about pronouns.
Still, I'd like to think that sooner or later one or two of them will understand the appeal of going after that kind of thrill, that joy that can only come from accomplishing something. And for it to be truly thrilling, you can't be accomplishing it for the sake of reward or prizes or money, but for the ability to stand on your own two feet and say I did it. That's an amazing feeling.
Of course, if someone were to decide to give you large quantities of money to publish what you did, well, it'd be kind of stupid to say "No."
Blake M. Petit is going to conquer this mountain if it kills him. He's also going to try to use up all of his cliches like "conquer this mountain" here at Think About It Central to keep them the hell out of his novel. Contact him with comments or suggestions at BlakePT@cox.net.