Word Bender

Yeah, so I’m writing a novel. Little ol’ me. Even before I bailed on art school last autumn, I had an idea coalescing in my head. It was like a bunch of little pieces of imagination that I’d had over the years suddenly all started sticking to one another in a rational shape, telling me that they didn’t want to be a bunch of short stories, they wanted to be The Story—a book. Remember, at the time I was still in art school, so busy that I had to look at my schedule to see when I could bathe and eat. But now I’m not, that’s the crucial difference between this fall and last. Now I’m not only able to write, I’m supposed to write. And since I can never do anything by halves…

I’ve had it in my head that I wouldn’t “know how” to write a novel until after I got out of school, that I should wait and be educated before messing with the big leagues. Somehow I keep forgetting that I’m not a clueless, overambitious 18-year-old, but a nearly-thirty woman with plenty of experience. So I said to hell with it, I’ll start next spring. Then I saw a flyer in the Williams (English) building at school, advertising National Novel Writing Month. I couldn’t help but check out something that outrageous.

And it is outrageous. The idea is, you start with zero words on midnight, November first, and end at midnight, November 30th with a novel of at least 50,000 words. You submit it to their website in time, their computer scrambles it for security and checks the word count, and if you make it, you basically get to brag for the rest of your life. Sure, it’s insane. But so? I have the idea, I have the requisite self-overestimation (to get me started) and touchy pride (to keep me going). Sure, the novel I write will need massive editing, to say the least. But I’ll have written a novel. Take that, infidels!

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