While discussing goals, aspirations, desires, etc. the idea was raised, I'm not sure by whom, that perhaps I should try my hand at writing. I've always considered myself a decent writer, nothing exceptional certainly, but usually able to convey my point. 3 years of law school has certainly honed my writing in interesting new ways. One thing I've never done though, was write a novel. Or even a decently long short story for that matter. But for some reason the idea appealed to me. I don't consider myself a very good story teller. My anecdotes always have a tendency to fizzle out and my jokes usually require me to explain the punchline that I have so awkwardly delivered. But perhaps in print where I have the ability to correct my numerous mistakes I can finally tell a story that's at least worth the time it took to read.
So it was decided, I would write. But what would I write? Poetry was out. I took a creative writing class to satisfy an English credit as an undergrad, and while it was interesting to read, it was not even remotely fun for me to compose. Short stories could be interesting, I think it's great when there's a little gimmick that's allowed to play out but doesn't overstay its welcome. But a single short story didn't seem like it would be the accomplishment that I was going for, and I don't know that I have the creative power to come up with several compelling ideas for a collection of short stories.
I knew, really from the beginning, that I wanted to write a novel. And I knew that it was going to be fiction. Essentially, I wanted to write something that I would like to read. So my first step was to do a little research into just what it takes to write a novel. I spent a few hours on the internet and read a lot of interesting ideas from many different sources. Something that really drew my interest was a website devoted to writing an entire book in 1 month: http://www.nanowrimo.org/ . I thought it was a fantastic idea. 1 month is a very reasonable goal, at least for someone who has never taken on this project. So I started reading a little more on the idea, and found this blog post: http://www.ghostwoods.com/2010/05/how-to-write-a-book-in-three-days-1210/ . As you can see from the link, it's titled "How to Write a Book in 3 Days." An author, Michael Moorcock, has a method wherein he writes an entire 60,000 word novel in 3 days. The second I saw this post, I knew what I had to do: 3 words, in 60,000 days (rimshot).
But in all serious, the idea really hit me. Why not do it in 3 days? My research showed me that the most-used technical definition of a novel requires it to be over 40,000 words, and that 60,000 words is a very standard novel length, resulting in around 250 print pages. That's a good afternoon's read, something that I could be proud of, at least length-wise. I know that there are different average word counts for the various genres, but I'm more interested in simply writing the book than I am in writing something simply to try and sell. I also recognize that length has nothing to do with quality, and I don't know how high expectations can be for something written in such a short period of time. I've never read one of Mr. Moorcock's books, although if they lack any sort of erotica then clearly he chose the wrong pen name. His books could be complete crap, although apparently he was quite prolific and had some favored characters. All I know is that I want to try writing 60,000 words in 3 days.
So, the rules. Well, there aren't any, not really. My goal is to try and stick to those 3 days. I'd planned to start on Monday, but with the wife having the day off, it didn't really work out. Tuesday I spent some time with Scrivener, learning how it worked and deciding if it's what I wanted to use to tackle this beast of a challenge (it is). We had company Tuesday so it seemed an impolite time to really get into. So that leaves today. I've spent a couple hours already today making a very rough sketch of the kind of setting I wanted and working on a couple of the main characters. I'm not going to reveal much at this point as so much of it is still up in the air, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be Cyberpunk, a genre that is sorely lacking in good reading material (in my opinion). So I'm giving myself until Saturday night to have this book done, maybe Sunday depending on how dutiful of a husband I need to be. I thought about timing it for 72 hours exactly, but that seemed unnecessarily strict.
This blog was inspired by my wife, by the way. She has 2 blogs of her own and told me that it would be a fun way to share my experience with others. In the most cliche of manners, I'm going to assume that no one will ever read this, but it is nice to have some sort of chronicle of the events to come. I'll be updating periodically, perhaps a couple times a day, or at least whenever I need to vent my frustrations or gloat about my achievements. Perhaps most importantly, this has been a test of how fast I can type and come up with things to discuss. This post will be about 1200 words, and has taken me about 30 minutes to write. That tells me that I'll theoretically need around 25 hours of straight typing, assuming I know basically what I'm going to write. 8 hours a day, plus maybe 2 or 3 more for planning really isn't that bad. I don't know if I'll actually stick to 60,000 words, I'm not going to force it if I'm under, but my past writing tended towards the prolific, so I also won't limit myself if I feel that there's still good story to be told.
With that, I leave for now. Good luck to me I guess. This should be an interesting few days.
No comments:
Post a Comment