March 7, 2006

Book in a Month Club

A good friend mentioned a novel (ha ha… very punny) idea today… the idea of writing a novel in a month. Take the arduous project of writing a 50,000 word novel, and break it up into 30 work segments, or 30 days, and you’ve got roughly 1,700 words a day to get on the page. Apparently there is an organized phenomenon of people that do this during the month of November.

People ask me, “what do you do?” And I say, “I’m a writer.” And then I sort of qualify it… about how I want to write, but I don’t really write as much as I’d like. It’s like a fat person saying they’re on a diet, or a smoker saying they’re gonna quit soon. It’s so easy to not do the thing you want to do most. I’ve got books on writing the way dieters have diet pills and work-out clothes that they don’t wear. But I do know how to work out. I can make myself run for an hour, 56 seconds a lap, three steps for every breath. And I’ve pounded out 15 page papers when they were due the next day. So why can’t I nail 1700 words a day? One step at a time right… one word at a time? 72 in a minute…

So why not just start… like tomorrow. And go? Maybe it will be a shitty novel. But that’s better than nothing. Right? Write.

I suppose it might mean I’ll have to forego a few other things… like randomly surfing the internet looking for interesting ideas. Late night bad TV. Obsessing over eyebrow hair. Deep cleaning my cabinets. Annotating my MP3 collection. Staring out the window. But who wants to do that manky stuff anyway?

Bug me if you want to read it in a month.