ToBS R1: NaNoWriMo vs. ‘What is your novel about?’
[Matchup #12 in Tournament of Bookshit]
On “What is your novel about?”…
The kneejerk hatred of “Wiyna?” has partly to do with the dread of trying to encompass an entire novel in a soundbite, along with the sense that revealing something that took a lot of effort and patience to write a novel about, something that the author may have spent a long time probing the aboutness of, something that now probably has an amount of sacredness to the author, to casually remark, “It’s about…” can be taken as an attempt to devalue/demystify the novel from the author’s point of view.
But for as loaded as the question comes at the author, it is almost a necessary question for the asker on a primary level. To be in conversation with an author who says, “I wrote a novel.” and says no more, it’s human nature to at least think the question “What’s it about?” or “What is it like?” or “Can you please give me some kind of concrete idea or image related to your novel so I can attach it to my memory of ‘you wrote a novel.’” One reason the asker may not completely appreciate the weight of the question is because many products of mainstream entertainment have obvious aboutnesses. For the sake of casual conversation, “Schindler’s List” is simply about the holocaust. “J. Edgar” is about J. Edgar Hoover. “Superman,” “Spiderman,” and “Batman,” are about Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, respectively. When your novel’s title is a bit abstract like “There Is No Year” or “Us,” the mind has a hard time nailing down even a thread of aboutness. And human beings like aboutnesses. They like people who like aboutnesses. So answering the question politely may leave an impression on the asker that this author is a nice person and maybe we can be friends now. READ MORE >
NaNoWriMyAssHo
How’s that going for you?
It’s National Shitty First Draft Month
"My novel will follow a woman trapped in an inflatable pool"
As someone who spent a lot of time in high school using the proto-social networking site Livejournal, I suffer an acute awareness that November is “NaNoWriMo,” or, of course, National Novel Writing Month. I have spent most of my life completely not caring. This year, I have decided to “participate.” I have no intention of writing an entire novel, but I would like to make myself write 50,000 words in the month of November (split between three different projects).
I didn’t sign up on the website or anything, in fact, I’m not even sure if that’s a thing you are supposed to do, but I have made this proclamation based on the fact that I am a fan of arbitrary constraints and mandates and the way they affect me as an artist. I feel like if I were in the right place at the right time, I would probably have joined the OuLiPo, even though I basically like their methods more than their actual work itself.1 In February I participated in “Song A Day,” which is, as the name would imply, an activity in which you write and record a song a day– I’m not even a particularly competent musician, but it was a lot of fun and certainly brought a lot of things into perspective. What’s interesting to me is that it was easier for me to consistently stay on track doing something that I rarely, if ever, do (writing & recording songs) than it has been, in just four days, to accomplish something that I (already) do regularly at a more rapid pace (1,666 words a day seems like a lot more than the 500 I generally aim for).
Anyway, the point is, I guess. How do you feel about NaNoWriMo? As evidenced by this Salon article by Laura Miller, some people think it is a dumb thing. I agree with a lot of what Miller says in her article, but not all of it. I’m sure there are countless people that could testify to the virtues of NaNoWriMo, but I also assume that these commentaries are mostly to be found on the NaNoWriMo website, which for some reason will never load on my work computer (sorry?).
Would you try it? Do you think it could be helpful? Is it something dumb that is primarily aimed at teen girls who spend all of their free time writing fan-fic2?
1 Yes, I know that the OuLiPo still exists. I mean “in its heyday”
2 This seems to be the target audience on Livejournal at least.
NaNoWriMo Tips from Mark Sample
A little over a week has passed this NaNoWriMo, and though I am pretty much skeptical of the whole production, I have to say that I’m cracking up at some of the NaNoWriMo tips that Mark Sample sends out on his twitter feed. Follow him at samplereality (you’ll have to scroll through his feed to find his old ones) to get tips. Here’s a handful that I enjoyed:
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Reenergize your writing by changing your workspace. Move out of your parents’ basement.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Rehearse for your imminent book tour by showing up drunk at a Borders and telling everyone “I’m here to sign my books.”
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Add tension by making the gender of your narrator indeterminate. This works for race too. And age. And number of nipples.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: Writing about a brilliant professor who solves 1,000-year-old mysteries? This is for you. Why does my cat puke in my shoes?
#NaNoWriMo tip: “Write about what you know” is good advice, unless you’re OJ Simpson.
#NaNoWriMo Tip: RT @wshspeare Take advantage of the rich tradition of stealing other writers’ ideas and words when you run out of your own.
#NaNoWriMo tip: Use foreshadowing to hint what’s to come. E.g., have the vampire say “I want to suck your blood” before he sucks blood.
#NaNoWriMo tip: Novelists should dress for success just like everyone else. Failing that, novelists should at least dress.
NaNoWriMo – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing
Today, people all across everywhere have typed the first word on their way to writing 50k words that should resemble in some way a ‘novel.’
I am not a ‘fan’ of NaNoWriMo. There is something corporate and mindless about it, to me anyhow. Even the website looks corporate and mindless. Not that corporations are bad. I just have a hard time thinking about writing that way – have you seen these romance novels that you can insert your name into and the name(s) of your lover(s)? That is corporate to me.
But I know many people who are fans of NaNoWriMo and who participate in it, and they are all good people (I think). So that makes me think that maybe there is something I don’t get about NaNoWriMo. That maybe I am the moron. That maybe while I complain about NaNoWriMo, all these other people are actually getting some writing done.
I once took a class that forced me to write a 40k word novel in a semester. The experience was painful. My writing was pretty awful. I felt like a kid throwing a temper tantrum. I purchased Chris Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem (NoPloNoPro, as I like to call it). In it, a man who has maybe three or four unpublished manuscripts sitting in his desk gave me advice about how to write a novel. Thanks Chris.
In good news, that class led to some stories that were later published.
But not a novel.
If the number of participants in NaNoWriMo each year equals the number of people who have purchased his self-help book novel book, then Chris Baty is making good money.
What is good about NaNoWriMo? I’m sure there are good things about it, but I am stubborn and like to only think about things in my brain using very simple language, such as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘sleepy,’ etc.
I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport and I am waiting to board my airplane to Houston. If the plane crashes, then this will be the last thing I ever wrote in my life:
A shitty post on NaNaWriMo.
Okay, we’re boarding. Wish me luck and then go visit this site – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. I laughed a little bit: ”Express yourself all you want. Just don’t keep submitting it for publication. You’re filling the world with shit.”
