PARTHURBLOG

This may have escaped your attention, but November was National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo.

It’s an online initiative run out of the US, to encourage would-be writers (aka slackers who talk a good story) to finally, finally, finally shut up about it and put words on paper.

The goal is straightforward : 50,000 words in 30 days. The route equally simple : 1,667 words a day.

After years of procrastinating at a world-class level, I bit the bullet on 1 November, got up an hour earlier than usual, and wrote my first slab of text. And that’s all it was, a slab. As Truman Capote said of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ scroll: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

This morning, 29 days later without missing a day, I reached the finishing line. 50,482 words of typing. Bad typing.

Oh, there are a couple of moderately interesting characters; there’s a sort of plot; there’s the possibility of a resolution; there are some good jokes; there’s some musings on life and the world; and none of it is in any way related to what I had in mind when I set out.

And I don’t care. Like the runner who comes 8,234th in the London Marathon, all that matters is completing the race. I showed up, every day.

There have been some days when it has flowed like golden syrup; there have been a lot more when it’s been an utter, unforgiving slog. While I haven’t re-read any of it, I know that there are one or two really good paragraphs (they’ll be the first to go – ‘Murder your darlings’ advised Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) and a lot of repetition. When the blue pencil comes out, I’ll be lucky if 20% stays.

And I don’t care. Every morning I have been down the ideas mine and cut out some raw material, blocks of words that now need shaping and honing and polishing. Somewhere in there are the notions of a book. And if not, then a LOT of blog postings (you’ll be delighted to hear).

So why go public with this; why bask in my own wonderfulness?

Because, as any regular reader knows, the standard form of ‘the novel’ is over 100,000 words. Even if everything created in the past month were the outpourings of a Pulitzer Prize winner, I’d only halfway there. In truth, I’m less than a tenth of the actual distance.

I don’t want to lose momentum. I shall be up tomorrow morning, doing my 1,667 words, and when I reach 100,000, it’ll be time for a break and a review: Is there anything worth keeping, or do I start afresh?

Douglas Adams was so skilled at missing deadlines that his agent once locked him in a room for three days to get a contracted book finished. Despite best of intentions, some of us need that sort of external threat to keep us on the straight and narrow.

You – dear blog reader – are now the other half of an emotional contract with me. I shall report back on 31 December.

I hope it’s not with my tail between my legs.

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