A Very Drafty First Draft
So here I am, doing a marathon—not running, but writing. It’s less fun than it sounds… and I’m aware that it doesn’t really sound like fun.
November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo: you can sign up for support, cheerful bulletins, competitive challenges, and so on, while you attempt to write an entire novel (or at least 50,000 words) in a month. A lot of people find it very helpful—it forces you to really keep the seat of your pants on the seat of the chair and get a first draft hammered out. If you’re a writer, you might want to consider getting involved: if nothing else, it can be rather fun seeing how much or how little you’re able to produce under pressure. A novel in a month: it’s an ambitious goal.
It's really helpful for people like me who apparently think there are more hours in the day than there actually are—and yeah, I do have a competitive streak; I love watching the progress I’ve made shape up online. A couple of my Sydney Riley mystery novels got their start during NaNoWriMo, when I’d already done the necessary research for the books and had to just sit and pound out that first draft. So it’s altogether a Good Thing. I have two more mysteries coming out in 2020, and one of them is only starting to be imagined!
Anthony Trollope produced an astonishing 47 novels during his career, and he published two dozen of them while working in the General Post Office. Pause a moment to contemplate that, and then listen to him: “All those I think who have lived as literary men–working daily as literary laborers–will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.” Well, three hours a day—or the 2,000 words a day it takes to reach 50,000 by November 30th!
First drafts are tricky. You want to edit as you go along. You want to sit and stare out the window, or brew another coffee, or play Solitaire. The only way to get through them is just to sit and write.
In 2006 I received a writing fellowship to one of Provincetown’s “dune shacks”—one-room cabins with no electricity or running water out on the back shore of Cape Cod. I spent two weeks there, writing—as one must—on a manual typewriter. And discovered a purity of writing I hadn’t known for many years. All you can do with a typewriter is write. You can’t Google something (I call that “research,” but you know exactly what I mean), or check your email, or even go back over yesterday’s work and edit it. All you can do is write. And that’s the idea behind a first draft: just get it written, go back and rewrite and refine and edit later. And that’s precisely what NaNoWriMo allows you to do.
It has to be said that a lot of the writing life is spent waiting. Waiting for inspiration; waiting for someone to get back to you; waiting for edits; waiting for publication; waiting for reviews. This month I’m experiencing the other end of the activity spectrum. Some people call it energetic focused writing.
Me? I call it insanity. But maybe you have to be stark raving mad to be a writer in the first place.