Ernest Hemingway asked us to bleed at our typewriters. The heroic man of action at his station of writing was surprisingly sedate, famously spending mornings putting in commas (I believe he was also responsible for planting forests of exclamations marks or bread-crumb leading dots melting into unspoken understanding) and the afternoons removing them (as a connoisseur of procrastination, I would have loved to ask him when he made the time to write. After all, even exaggerations require at least a fine umbilical cord to reality).
Most would point to his insomnia fuelled nights of passion (of both the carnal and literary variety) as the engines of his vast body of work. Whatever the facts, I can state (a gorgeous phrase we do not hear more admittance of on television talk shows), the man took his time. And we can all safely agree, for good reason.
A wealth of time, however, is not easily found in life. Or writing. This is the quintessential mantra of the NaNoWriMo which begins on the 1st of November and will, as many of its participants will testify, gallop towards the 30th of the same frenetic month. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for the National Novel Writing Month. It is an annual internet-based exercise in producing a novel of 50,000 words in the 30 days that span the month of November.
The fledgling project began in 1999 with 21 rather kooky participants (kooky a term of endearment not widely understood possibly because I redefined it in my mind when no one was being definition-appropriate) but by 2010 had exploded into one (and half?) phase of Defence consisting of 200,000 participants. These people together wrote a “can-this-please-be-a-dollar-count-instead-of-a-word-count”-the-politicians-asked figure of 2.8 billion words.
Being geographically ignorant and mathematically manipulative, I had to rely on a description supplied by the magnificently named Office of Light and Letters, which runs this programme (as well as others). According to the voices on the dais of this hallowed institute, 2.8 billion words represent a road of characters which stretch from Berkeley, California to Timbuktu (a favorite far-away, exotic locale for Americans) and back (for the criminally curious, the font used in the construction of this highway of alphabets is “Gotham Book” with a font size of 10).
Leaving aside the fact such a road makes me imagine a world built solely of ink and paper characters (someone should write a magic realist novel on exactly that; a realm where words become the very fabric of reality rather than merely being observing descriptors. E.g. “the sand-storm battered their little cottage, hordes of s’s, a’s, n’s and d’s storming their vertically-centered hovel with lances mounted on the pointed hilt of exclamation marks.”), it is an impressive number which would perform the double act of causing unbridled and unattractive salivation as well as tickling the feet of wordsmiths.
Wouldn’t a 50,000 word novel written in 30 days (at a rate of roughly 1667 words) be, to put it politely, a horse fart on a warm, sultry, breezy day? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be a masterpiece, a maniacal distillation of literary genius, funneled past hesitation, procrastination and self-doubt crashing, completing in its unstill existence, your own narratorial alchemy.
But the point is, it doesn’t matter what you write, just that you do. That is what NaNaWriMo celebrates. The website shamelessly proclaims its proclivity for quantity over quality. A tightening noose is a grand incentive for the hung to do something about his/her condition. That is the rationale behind this movement. Shed your inhibitions, set adrift your fears on an ill-equipped and ill-appropriately named lifeboat and allow yourself to make mistakes.
Perfection must be burned at the stake, its feet boiled in steaming steel vats of holy water. Destroy, create. NaNoWriMo is for those who have forever wanted to write a novel but have been unable to do so for whatever reasons (regular, established writers are allowed freedom to scoff at this rather plebian exercise). You may not even be able finish your novel but that is just the thing. This is not about the fear of failure; this is about the impetuosity of beginning.
With a vibrant forum and an unexpectedly friendly/supportive cast of characters on the website, it would be a folly not to at least try. So join this November writing caravan and dictate to a page (many pages) what your soul has been itching you silly to say. The least I can promise is that you will not end up with an empty page which once contained a comma in the morning.
NaNoWriMo begins 1st November.
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.