Write a novel - I double dare you

"If you want to write a novel, here's my advice: lock up your characters at night."
 

    Most writers by now know what NaNoWriMo means: National Novel Writing Month. This is an exercise started in 1999 by 8 guys in the San Francisco area. This year they had almost 100,000 participants in their challenge: use the 30 days in November to write a novel.

    Being constantly on the alert for writing experiences, dedicated to bringing you the very latest in cutting-edge journalism and having no shame, I undertook this challenge on Nov 1 (as did quite a few people on Gather). I did it for the experience and to impress my "your son is not a writer until he's written a novel" mother. By her standards, you don't need to get a novel published, just written. NaNoWriMo seemed the least painful way to accomplish that maternal uber-goal.

    The NaNoWriMo theory of writing bears a great resemblance to the Infinite Monkeys school of writing. If enough fingers are pounding on enough keyboards, something should turn up that's worth reading. It's mid-November as I write this first part of this article and so far I haven't seen any Hemingway spit out of my printer, but I have seen a lot of monkey chatter.

    I jumped into NaNoWriMo with both feet — no outline, no research, no character profiles filled out with the answers to probing questions. All I had at the start was a concept and a computer. How many dot.com gazillionaires have said those very same words?

    There is a limit set on this challenge: 50,000 words, which some say is a novella not a novel. I say, potato, potatah. The point is to practice writing without editing, to let the words flow from your mind onto paper, to unchain your muse and thumb your nose at your sixth-grade grammar teacher.

Let me tell you what can happen when you unchain your muse:

    You get a crazy idea for a fun chapter about a cat who is the richest resident in town thanks to a ridiculously generous bequeathal from her slightly dotty owner, previously the richest resident in town.

    You can imagine all the wacky shenanigans that take place starting from that premise. What I didn't imagine was the cat running away with my plot — as well as the dish and the spoon. I started writing the chapter and, three days later, I was still in the middle of telling this cat's story.

    I discovered that my cat, Ashes, was editing my drafts every night and typing in suggestions for even more clever things a cat character can do. I'm definitely caught in a case of catspiracy, which can be pronounced two ways.

    If you want to write a novel, here's my advice: lock up your characters at night. If you don't, characters that aren't supposed to get involved start winking and leering at each other the next day. Before you know it, you turn on your computer one morning and they're in bed together.

    Here's how you lock up characters: at the end of your writing day, type an added paragraph where you usher all the characters into a castle where each character is assigned a private dungeon cell, separated so they can't talk to each other. The next morning, delete that last scene and continue with your plot.

NOTE: If one or more of your characters is a superhero, then you have to go beyond a simple dungeon cell. If Superman is in your story, the last thing you should type is, "And, just before the evil dungeon master locked the cell door, he tossed in a glowing object wrapped in cloth. As the door clinked closed, Superman unwrapped the object. Yikes, Kryptonite!"

Epilogue: I did finish writing my novel — 52,317 words, if you count chapter headings, which I do. Words is words. The result was a couple of stand-alone short stories that, with a little more work, are worth sending out, a so-so novel that needs major structural surgery but might well survive the operation and a quite intriguing Young Adult novel about a rich, stubborn cat. Oh, and a column's worth of material.

    The good news is: I also got an agent! My granddaughter Sophia, age 2, has agreed to represent my book as soon as she graduates from college, which ties nicely with my expected completion date. What sold her was my cleverly crafted pitch. "It's a story about a cat."
However, the most important result is not that I finished but that my mother's son is now a writer, which I consider a better and considerably cheaper Christmas present than the cashmere jacket she had her eye on.
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