Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Nov 27, 2006

On writing novels

Filed in Blog

At around eleven p.m. on All Hallow’s Eve, I wandered into a local Denny’s to join a small horde of characters dressed as pirates, Star Ship Enterprise crew, and ghost and ghouls of various persuasions. I took off my jacket and helmet and quickly velcroed a Hawaiian grass skirt made of plastic strands over my jeans; a few plastic flowery leis finished the instant-outfit. I was dressed in Hallowe’en garb, and I was ready to start my novel.

I enjoyed the hour’s visit with my newfound friends despite the irony of, having finally found a creative group I liked, knowing that I most likely wouldn’t be around to play with them for more than a few months because of the news I’d gotten earlier that day. At midnight the flag went down, and we tap-tap-tapped into the small wee hours of November First.

This year, over 70,000 ~~loonies~~ hopeful enthusiasts signed up for National Novel Writing Month, a non-profit site which challenges you to write a 50,000 word novel during November and tries to make some money to build libraries in developing countries while it’s at it. I’d seen some of my online friends go through this rumpus the last couple of years, and when a plot idea hit me firmly between the eyes sometime in the Fall, I decided to give it a shot. It had been so long since Fiction had happened to me, let alone since I had given myself permission to write just for the fun of it, that I was excited and looking forward to finding out what all the fuss was about.

The whole point of what is affectionately known as NaNoWriMo is to write a bad novel. Everyone talks about some day writing a novel. Here, you get a chance to get over it and actually do the deed. Now, I have written a novel before, and there is a half-written sequel kicking around somewhere as well. I published it through a subsidy publisher because I was rewriting the whole thing so many times that it needed to be put to rest (the fact that its readers enjoyed it was a nice side effect). NaNoWriMo is a way of not writing the same novel for 18 years, and it would prove to be a very different experience.

For one, I did not worry about whether I would finish it or not. The most useful thing I ever learned in high school was how to touch-type, and I can clear the daily quota of 1667 words in about an hour. I am also not sure how many other people took the advice in the guide book, “No Plot, No Problem” to heart, but I did. I went into the project with the firm agreement with myself that a) it would be fun and b) it was not going to be a cause of stress and c) nobody else was allowed to read it, so it could be absolutely awful if I wanted it to be. I diligently did not go back to make corrections, I sat down in a comfy chair to write almost every day, and in fact the whole writing thing kept me sane as my other occupation for the duration was getting the house ready for the unwanted appraisal — a task of monumental proportions.

When I finished the story and had only 47,000 words, I cheated gratuitiously and gleefully, knowing that for NaNoWriMo this was perfectly acceptable. With NaNoWriMo, it’s all about the wordcount, any way you can. Or maybe that should be word count, as I then went back and replaced words like “that’s” with “that is”, spelled out numbers, added extra subtitles, and generally messed with the manuscript in a way that would make a professional novelist either squirm in horror or perhaps chuckle with glee (I believe that Dickens was originally paid by the word). Only when I found myself over 50,000 words did I type, with a happy little shiver, “The End”.

What I wasn’t expecting was how the characters came to life as I wrote them — they may only have seemed real to me, and since nobody else is to read this epic I won’t ever know about that. It had been a few years since I wrote fiction at all, and I’d forgotten about that “going with the flow” sensation of creation. Writing travel articles is different: there is certainly a sense of flow and rightness when the words all come together, but fiction is a pure and simple brain-child, whisked from nowhere onto the screen.

And plot happened! I did not do much planning, sketching out a few scenes in virtual pencil, but all sorts of interesting adventures and twists came into being. When I first thought about the novel, I had no intention of introducing a vampire as one of two primary narrators. And apparently the vampire had no intention of staying one, either, as he later morphed into a kind of not-quite-human embodiment of the Universe. I began the novel with some ideas that weren’t followed through to the end…and I didn’t care. I made up historical details based on brief Google searches on Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, which is to say that what I wrote was not at all historically accurate. I didn’t care about that, either.

In short, it was the most fun I’ve had writing for a long time, becuase I wasn’t trying to sell it or prove anything to anybody other than myself. It was like a month-long candy bar, a literary treat with no pretensions to literacy.

Great fun.

Will I do it next year? I haven’t the foggiest clue. If I get a hankering to write the sequel to “Rhaeva” this year, I might write the third book in the series next year. Or I might write a gothic romance and try to sell it to Harlequin. Or I might write something completely different. But one thing I do know. Now that I’m in the habit of writing daily, I feel that I can get some of those ideas onto paper and henceforth on to magazines and newspapers; and that, Dear Reader, is a jolly nice side-effect.