Four years running now I have attempted or pretended to attempt the creation of a (terrible) novel in the month of November. You might ask what my problem is, why keep doing this (or pretending to) if you know it isn’t going to happen? And I would answer, it could happen, but I would (completely) hate the results.
Most of my fiction (and we aren’t talking about all that much work here) vegetates for months as an idea, occasionally with sporadic notes, more likely just reoccurring thoughts that I can’t get rid. This is how my fiction writes itself, randomly and over long periods of time.
So November 1st rolls around and I realize that I have to start writing and if lucky I have a few fragments of characters, concepts, cataclysms, but more likely nothing. And so I will start writing stream of consciousness, mostly about how much I hate writing stream of consciousness; sometimes about how I shouldn’t be writing novels in November.
A few weeks ago Mary asked me if I was doing NaNoWriMo and I said resolutely, ‘no,’ that always goes too poorly for me. Then I got an email from D saying that they were all getting together for a write-in… and of course I attended. Because what else do I have to do on a Saturday evening than pretend I am writing a novel. And so while they are now counting thousands of words I have fifteen pages of a notebook filled with some random thoughts, fragments of stories, and me writing about how much of a pain writing a novel without planning is.
Am I pretending to write a novel this month, of course I am! The good thing is I am for now writing more, but certainly not fifty thousand words more. If I were to finish it, I would hate myself more than if I did not–what I am really hoping for is a few usable paragraphs that will later grow short stories to cradle them into prose.
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