Write a novel in a month? No problem!

Damn Good Padding


At last, it's finished. "Tinker Visits the Woods," that is, or," Thoreau, I Like a Girl." All 506 chapters of it, and it only took me 30 days to write.

Yes, it's my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) novel, started on November 2nd (so actually 29 days) after I saw a mention of the competition in the Montana State University Exponent. It's not really a competition, in that there aren't really any prizes... I like to think of it as the equivalent of running a marathon for writers.

Me and 80,000 others from around were involved in this marathon, including about 130 or so from Montana. There was plenty of camaraderie in our little bunch, which included NaDruWriNi and a cut-throat battle for wordcount with Saskatchewan, in which we kicked their Canuck butts.

See, the trick to writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days is to concentrate on quantity, not quality. None of this editing nonsense, just crank out the words. Don't even look back, there'll be plenty of time for that in December. As for me, I didn't even have an outline going into this thing. All I had was the character Tinker, who made his first appearance in a story in my book "Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures." I just wanted to take Tinker and roll with him, and roll we did.

Undertaking the writing of a novel while having no idea of what the plot will be is admittedly a little strange. With Tinker, I handled this issue by making him a writer (which he was in the original story) who's writing a novel and searching for a plot. Clever, huh? That enabled me to essentially free associate the first 10,000 or so words, i.e. "I need a plot, Tinker thought"; "This sucks, not having a plot"; "I wonder how I can find a plot"; "Every other writer must have a plot by now"; etc.

The problem revealed itself when I was eventually forced to find a real plot, which ended up being something in which the character Tinker created became his antagonist, and for some reason Tinker felt compelled to have sex with a bunch of different women, some of whom only existed in his imagination. I should note that on the NaNoWriMo website they included interviews with authors who had successfully written NaNoWriMo novels in the past, who offered helpful advice on padding: when in doubt, bring in a new character, plot twist, sex scene, or have all the characters sit down to a gourmet meal. I repeatedly did all but the last one, and that's only because if I think about food when I'm writing I get hungry and the whole thing goes to hell.

So, basically, I ended up with 47,000 or so words worth of padding. And I think there's something to be said for that. It's damn good padding. Sometimes I thought the whole thing sucked and should be drop-kicked into the landfill, but when I actually got around to re-reading some of it (I separated it into 506 micro-chapters, and since finishing have made plans to name each one -- I'm up to Chapter 94 so far), I sensed that it wasn't that bad. Not good, mind you, but not bad.

I've only shown it to one person so far... but that's mainly because I'm embarrassed by all the raunchy sex scenes that ended up in there. It's amazing the things writer's block will make you do.

Does anybody want to see it? Let me know!