Apparently there are some people out there are trying to write a novel in a month. Since they’re engaged in a project called National Novel Writing Month, this is entirely commendable and to be expected.
Almost no-one will actually complete a novel, which is also to be expected. Even if the requisite beginning, middle, and end are in place, the work will have only just begun. As I’ve argued elsewhere we should have a National Novel Revision Month (NaNoReMo) to usher in the rewrites.
So if we’re not going to wrap it all up on 30 November, should we be trying to create a rounded narrative at all? Might we rather turn the inevitability of our unfinished novel to our advantage?
I’m going to turn in my 50k words if I can. But I also want to use some of the tricks I have been reading and writing about. Writing scenes more than once, for example. Or trying out different points of view. I even want to try out new versions of my outline. In fact just today, I veered into interesting new story territory. While I’m keen to explore this byway, I don’t necessarily want to commit 10k words to the experiment. I’d rather sketch out some scenes and try them for size.
If you ask a friendly NaNoWriMo forum moderator whether or not outlines are legal wordcount, they’ll rightly tell you that they are not. That is presumably because outlines, and other meta-writing live outside the novel itself. You shouldn’t count things that aren’t part of your novel.
Well that’s true of course. Unless you’re writing a postmodern novel.
I don’t want to get bogged down in academic definitions, especially of a contested term, but there are a couple of characteristics that interest me here. Postmodern literary texts tend to play games centered around the role of the author. They often explore the fraught relationship between the author and his/her work. The also look at the way that a readership reinvents an author in order to explain and organize texts.
Think this idea of the author over-intellectualizes the reality? Imagine a lost novel by Dickens is discovered in a Victorian attic. As you read it, would it be the text’s place in Dickens’ oeuvre that exercised you, and questions of authenticity? Or would it be the value of the text pure and simple? And what if it were then discovered to be a brilliant fake, would that lessen the work’s value?
Postmodernist works also construct metafictions. That is, they often describe the structure and form of fiction within the work itself. They expose and explore the way that literature conjures its worlds and then make this one of the novel’s subjects.
So the novel I intend to turn in on Nov 30 will be a story about writing my novel. One of my characters, The Writer, interrupts the action occasionally to ponder the effectiveness of a scene or an exchange. He unravels a plotline and tries it out again, feeling his way into the most fruitful direction. He enters into dialog with his characters, and he sketches out possible futures, sometimes at a very high level, and sometimes right down in the minute to minute interactions of the scene.
My Writer is unreliable and he’s cruel. He will sacrifice the happiness, even the life of a character to further the ends of the story. He’ll lie to the reader, or at least misdirect, to heighten tension. And he’ll do it all in plain sight.
Of course, come the rewrite next year, my Writer will up sticks and move out of the text. After deconstructing my novel, I’ll need to set to and reconstruct it all over again.
If you think that this is just an elaborate ruse to bend the rules of NaNoWriMo, you’re missing the point. This is precisely and exactly the spirit of NaNoWriMo. I’m taking planning, and outlining, and drafting, and letting them benefit from the creative energy the enterprise offers. I’m not stopping to edit or analyze too deeply, I’m exploring and reinventing my writing as I go. By turning my planning into story and making my story the plan for my rewrite, I’m making it fun, too. I’m having my cake and eating it. I hope.
Am I suggesting for a moment that you approach your project this way? Absolutely not. It’s an enjoyable experiment. And that is the point.
