Call them hypertexuals.
In a brutal test of speed, imagination and tenacity, a few hundred Coloradans and thousands of other Americans are striving to bang out a novel under deadline pressure this month. Their goal: 50,000 words apiece – about 175 pages – by midnight Wednesday.
It’s all part of National Novel Writing Month, a fist-to-the-forehead exercise founded by Chris Baty, a 33-year-old California freelancer who champions the notion that “if you give yourself too much time, things never get done.”
The quality of the prose in these first drafts – purple or plain, putrid or passable – doesn’t really matter. The focus is purely on quantity. Word count. Volume. Verbosity.
“The trick is not to wait for inspiration, but to hit it with a cudgel,” says Robin Dean of Fort Collins, a 22-year-old graphic designer who is cranking out what she describes as “a baroque science-fiction novel, sort of Alexander Dumas on another planet.”
“The important thing for me is never looking back and worrying about whether it’s good or not,” she says. “It helps me not obsess as much about getting everything perfect the first time.”
Dean and some 70 similarly driven comrades have been engaged in an unofficial laptop duel with their counterparts in Greeley, to see which group can produce more average verbiage.
The odds favor Fort Collins, in part because Dean – a Haverford College English graduate – passed the 50K threshold by mid-month, burning up the keyboard at an average pace of 3,000 words a day. Clearly a masochist, she is pushing on to a conclusion she figures will unfold after about 92,000 words, the equivalent of 300 pages.
But don’t count out the 30 or so would-be novelists from Greeley. They’ve got Jared Fiel, a 36-year-old family man who’s pumping out his fourth entry in this annual run-on-at-the-mouth. It’s a thriller called “Black Sheep,” about a creepy serial killer who secretly lives in the homes of his unsuspecting victims for weeks before he offs them.
“I wasn’t able to finish the first year because I was actually trying to write something deep and meaningful. It wasn’t smart,” says Fiel, an Aims Community College marketer who moonlights as a humor columnist. “This is all about aiming to write absolute garbage. If you aim for garbage, you’d be surprised how often it comes out smelling pretty good.”
At least seven manuscripts that came out of previous runnings of the event have been sold to big-time publishing houses, according to Baty, who keeps his hand in it through a breezy and entertaining website at NaNoWriMo.org.
“When you give yourself such a short amount of time, you end up losing your inner editor, and that’s a great approach for a first draft,” he says. “You realize it will be flawed, and you may lose some beautiful language or moving metaphors. But you end up with something more important, which is a book with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
Participation is free, although donations are solicited to pay web-hosting costs and help sponsor a literacy project called Room to Read, which built three children’s libraries in Cambodia with proceeds from last year’s event and is expected to add several more in Laos with this year’s take.
Other than a certificate and a cool Web icon, those who go the distance in the scrawlathon get no reward beyond bragging rights. The main appeal – aside from getting juiced up on as much coffee, tea or Mountain Dew as you need to keep going – appears to be the opportunity to develop a habit of writing every day and to share the pain involved in the creative process.
Many participants gather at regular “write-ins” at local coffee shops or friendly bookstores to work out plot or character problems. (Can a mouse accidentally hot-wire a car? Could a beautician immobilize a client using only hair-care products?) And they enjoy the camaraderie of the chase.
“For one month a year, I feel like a real writer – someone I’ve wanted to be since high school,” says Jamie DeBree of Billings, Mont., a 30-year-old Avon woman who is churning out a tale of a murder-mystery party at which the murders turn out to be real.
“I have a deadline that isn’t self-imposed; I have the company of thousands of other writers working on the same assignment; and I have the freedom to just write, even though my grammar, punctuation and sentence structure often make me cringe while I’m writing it,” she says.
“NaNo has taught me how to get that first draft down on paper, and the sense of accomplishment I get from that is absolutely incredible.”
Some 60,000 signed up for the current workout, up substantially from the 42,000 last year, and way more than the mere 21 who picked up the gauntlet (raised their fists? sounded the charge? gunned their engines?) the first year in 1999.
Besides Fort Collins and Greeley, the Colorado contingent includes chapters in Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs, plus several school English classes. Nationally, the event generates the most enthusiasm in the Twin Cities and in Maryland, which have been running neck and neck all month in the total word-count standings posted on the NaNoWriMo website.
“So many people have the sense that writing has to be a ponderous thing, where you lock yourself in a garret for two years,” says Baty. “It’s more productive to have it be this giddy, breathless block party.”
So how do people with jobs, families and other obligations find enough spare time to indulge in such fits of volubility?
“I trick myself,” admits Fiel, who has been a “winner” three times running and is on track to hit the 50K mark again this year. “With the change from daylight-saving time (as of Oct. 30), I just set my alarm for a half-hour earlier than I used to. That gives me one and a half hours every day to write during the work week.”
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
