Let's see if I can keep this short enough not to cut into the time of those doing "National Novel Writing Month" challenges...
Before "NaNoWriMo" was an American Tradition, the thought occurred to me in grade ten, which I did at a very boring school. Why not fill in some of the dead time in November by writing a full-length young adult novel?
I called it Slowly Goes November. I don't remember just when I burned it--grade eleven, likely. I knew people believed all teenagers could possibly write would be autobiography, and what I'd written was anything but autobiography. I did weave in a few tidbits from the real world I saw, a kitten, as I recall, and the way an older person used a teenager's given name as a swearword substitute under stress. I made the character's first-person writing voice a conscious imitation of the voice of the teen drama queen in Katie Letcher Lyle's I Will Go Barefoot All Summer for You. Other than that, the story basically reminded my best friend, to whom I was writing regularly and who was just starting to date the man she later married, how many other school friends had been "in love" for a week or two and then fallen out of "love" again. I remember deliberately giving my main character my worst friend's given name, putting her in the classes neither my best friend nor I took, giving her food preferences that were opposite to mine. She liked grapefruit and hated pineapple. So then I didn't want anyone thinking that I preferred grapefruit to pineapple, or was going to take drama class and kiss a boy (described the way my best friend described her boyfriend) in the wings. So I burned the manuscript.
In a way it's a pity that today's word processors save so much paper. A lot of NaNoWriMo manuscripts would be of some use in this world if they were typed on paper that was used to light wintertime fires...
Earlier this week, reading back through an e-friend's blog archive, I came to the point where she started doing daily writing challenges. For years I'd been thinking that this was just a nice person who had more talent for finding pictures and music to decorate her blog than she had for actually writing it. Wrong. She confessed, in a post I had't read before, "I limit the time I spend on these 'poems' to five minutes. That is the only way I can post one a day." That explained a lot.
When people just apply the seat of the writer to the seat at the desk until X number of words or pages are produced, they get something the size of the content they want, all right. And if they then lock it in a drawer for a few months, and reread it, some of it will see that they have wrought the first draft of a novel or a poetry collection. Others, well, if they have modern toilets that need a balance of solids and liquids, they have a lot of good dry material to put down them. (Computer storage? Don't even think about it if you want first-draft privacy. People will be able to see what you store "in the cloud.")
Anne Lamott, Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg and other friends-of-writers use a phrase to describe first drafts. Adhering to the terms of our contract, this web site will translate that phrase as "Rubbishy First Drafts."
If you're going to write them you must accept in advance that they will be, well, rubbishy.
When I think about different levels of violation of privacy, I realize that I don't really care who sees me in the shower any more. It's not as if the body were nineteen years old any more, or likely to pass for it again in this lifetime. Older people usually cover our skin pretty thoroughly but that's in order to spare the eyes of the public rather than to protect any sense of pudor we may unrealistically have preserved after forty or fifty years of medical examinations, at least, and in many cases surgeries and childbirths. But I would feel violated if anyone were looking at my first drafts.
Nevertheless, when writers just do those first drafts, accept their wretchedness, and keep revising them, who knows where they'll end.
In 1998 when I met the writer known as Zahara Heckscher, she was living in a very small furnished room--she'd lived in Zambia and made a commitment to share her money with her friends there--with a large closet overflowing with scraps of paper, letters, forms, brochures, and cassette tapes. She had a desktop computer and the Original Toshiba Satellite laptop and about a dozen .doc files, divided among them, that consisted of vague rambling low-content prose...a painful and pathetic sight to see. She and Joe Collins had spent a year or two gathering this, to put it kindly, mess. When I joined the team, they were just beginning to convert the mess to a real nonfiction book.
In 2001 three primary authors, each with two or three main assistants, and a few hundred contributors had indeed turned the mess into a full-sized book, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. It was printed--as cheaply as possible, by the authors' request, so it was easy for students to read and carry around. It was a solid book that met a need. "It'll move onto the Internet as the Internet grows," the authors thought, but it went into reprints before the Internet grew to that stage.
Writing challenge novels and poetry collections are usually closer to forming a book than that collection of data was, three short years before it formed a big serious reference book.
So, if you have a month with enough free time that you can take the challenge, go for it. Write a rubbishy first draft of a novel or poetry collection. Hide it somewhere for a few months. Dig it out, read it, and improve it. Eventually it may be a good book.
I'm not ready to commit, today, to writing a novel this month. I am no longer in high school, and for me even November no longer goes slowly, with endless half-hours of time spent practicing the highly dubious life skill of sitting still and watching the rain fall. Any novel writing I do has to fit in between writing book reviews and ghostwriting e-books and writing my own first Amazon e-book and I-would-like-to-get-in-some-time-outdoors-this-month. I've not spent enough time outdoors while trying to catch up with things in cyberspace. I don't mind looking (vaguely) like Yvonne DeCarlo but looking like Lily Munster, without the layers of makeup DeCarlo used, isn't even funny.
I'm not making any commitments not to write a novel this month, either. In November much depends on the weather--alluring sunshine, snowstorms, power outages, Wi-Fi tower collapses...
If I ever do rewrite my tenth grade November novel, it will reflect the reality: My best friend in high school took her teen romance slowly and sensibly, until time had shown that it was worth taking seriously. Last I heard, they were still married.
If I do write it, I promise to spare other people any glimpses of the first draft. The nature of drafts is to blow about in a way that makes people shudder. Usually the third or fourth draft is bearable, fit to show a small select group of Beta Readers.
Allowing at least six months for NaNoWriMo novel gestation, I'm willing to read other people's novels and show them mine.
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