At a few minutes after 9 pm Eastern time, I completed the National Novel Writing Month challenge on my first try. I just wrote a novel in 30 days!
Okay, so I didn't exactly "finish" the book. In fact, I'm nowhere even close. I had been writing fairly linearly, starting with at the beginning and working towards the end. I had a whole series of scenes in the middle that I had mapped out in my head which I never got the chance to write. If A is the beginning of the book and Z is the end, and if I had to estimate how complete the story is at this time, I'd say I'm at G or H right now -- probably no more than 33% done. And that's before any serious editing or revising.
But either way, it's still a big first step into completing a novel. Come join me beneath the fold as I celebrate my journey through my first ever 50,000-page work of fiction!
I hadn't even heard about NaNoWriMo until a few days before it started. Since I'm unemployed, my girlfriend had e-mailed me about it, thinking that I might enjoy spending November harnessing some creative energy. Within about a day, I was already coming up with a few ideas to run with. At first I thought I was going to write about a zombie-human war, inspired in part by the hilarious movie Zombieland. But I decided to take a different track: It's about a guy who wants to make a movie about a zombie-human war.
I was amazed at how much I discovered about the characters as I went along. The protagonist, Freddy, is a loner and a loser who knows anything and everything there is to know about action movies, horror movies, sci-fi movies, etc. He's also terrible at meeting and talking to women, haunted by the fact that he was once rejected 13 times for his senior prom. His older brother is a talented musician who could never get a break trying to make it in the music mainstream. His best friend is an aggressive, abrasive yet funny jerk who's trying to save up money to go to business school and who takes pleasure in watching Freddy fail at the dating scene. The cameraman for Freddy's movie is an expert photographer and amateur card shark with a sharp wit. The sound operator is a Silent Bob-like ex-cop who doesn't say much, but he's incredibly tough and muscular, and when he does talk, it's almost always considered a pearl of wisdom.
A lot of what went into the characters and their development was an extension of my personality. I love movies, and I especially love crappy monster and horror movies. For a long time, I was awful at talking to women (though I was not rejected 13 times for the senior prom). I've also done a lot of music in my life, having played the piano seriously for 15 years. I'm not much of a card player, but I like to play Texas Hold 'Em with my friends. No comment on whether or not I have a sharp wit -- that's for the reader to decide! Also, no comment on whether or not I'm tough or muscular. That's for me to decide.
Throughout the month, I had to steal away time late in the evening and very early in the morning to get my 1,666 words per day. I worked at a steady clip, needing just 1,500 or so words by the time I started this afternoon to make it past the 50,000-word threshold. I actually passed it around 8:30 pm this evening, but I decided to relax and watch the Pats-Saints game.
The real joy of the NaNoWriMo challenge, as I discovered, is just writing for the sake of having fun with the process. I didn't write with the goal in mind of hitting 50,000. I strove to finish the story, and since I ended up writing so much, I didn't even come close to finishing. So now, I have more to reach for in the months ahead. I knew that what I wrote would not be the Great American Novel, but that was never the point. The point was setting a very ambitious goal for myself, and I beat it.
I imagine that the more I write, the more I will continue to surprise myself about the depth of each character. I don't know where the story will go from here, but I can guarantee that I'm going to keep moving. I've already made it this far. Why stop now?
I'll provide a short excerpt of what I wrote. Can't guarantee it's that good right now, but I always have time to go back and write it later.
Besides watching films just for the sake of watching them, Freddy would also occasionally write down all of his thoughts and observations about the film he had just seen, describing the visual elements, plot devices, names and roles of cast members, and his own opinions about the movie. You might say that he was a dyed-in-the-wool film critic, but what he really aspired to be was a film director, though it took him a little while to get a handle of the concept.
In 1987, his parents bought a Toshiba 8-mm camcorder, which they used for the same innocuous reasons that most parents in New Jersey in the 80’s bought a household camera: To film birthday parties, family vacations, and all those special moments with their kids. Except, Freddy’s parents rarely got the chance to use it. It wasn’t because they were too busy with work or didn’t know how to operate the controls. It was because Freddy decided to use it for them, and not always for its intended purpose.
During an afternoon piano recital in which Dennis was performing, five-year-old Freddy grabbed the camera from his father in the middle of the performance, sprinted outside with it, pretended that it was a machine gun, and then proceeded to push all of the camera’s buttons in rapid succession, including the one that caused the tape to eject while it was attempting to rewind – ensnaring the film from the inside and ruining the footage. And when Freddy was "shot" by unseen forces across the street – imaginary soldiers who, clearly, were also using camcorders as their weapons of choice – Freddy had the great foresight to fall and swing the camera over his head, which cracked the lens as it hit the ground.
Amazingly, he ran fast enough that he could do all of this without his parents catching him in the act first. He was not fast enough, however, to escape what was considered to be the punishment of a lifetime back then – forced exile to his room at 7 pm for the rest of the night, and a ban on movies and video games for one week. It wasn’t until a few years later that Dennis eventually forgave him for destroying the footage of his first and only performance of "Hot Cross Buns."
Slowly but surely, Freddy would learn the purpose of a rewind button and a zoom lens, as well as every other setting on that Toshiba camcorder. He came to understand how to use lens filters and adjust the camera’s shutter speeds to account for changes in lighting, how to use the white balance to adjust for contrasting visual colors, how to alter the image resolution, and how to remember the difference between standard 8 mm and Super-8 video cartridges. Freddy’s first ever film was completed in the summer of 1988 when he was only six years old. Appropriately enough, the film was a 60-second chase scene, in which Freddy rode after a squirrel on his bicycle in the backyard, with the camera mounted firmly on the handlebar using industrial tape. He wove and dodged around trees, a garden hose, a beach ball, and the cars in the driveway, giving the chase a speed and intensity a la the famous car chase scene in The French Connection. The bright young filmmaker also provided his own soundtrack to the movie, roaring and vrooming along to imitate the sound of a high-powered car engine, and occasionally belting out a series of toneless but rhythmic grunts to simulate action movie music that one might expect in a scene like this.
Unfortunately for Freddy, the squirrel managed to escape up a tree in the neighbor’s yard – that is, assuming that his goal all along was to run it over, a distinct possibility given his reckless use of the bike and the camera the whole time. The film ended when Freddy spent too much time looking at the image in the camera than his field of vision directly in front of him, in which he forgot to note the big rock in front of his path that caused him to flip off the bike. It was one of several injuries that he and other actors on camera would endure while filming his fast-paced, action-packed short movies. Were this young man ever to join the ranks of Preminger, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Scorsese in the pantheon of great film directors, future historians would note that Squirrel vs. Bike was Freddy Ferdman’s first real creation.
Last thing: I'd like to take the time and commemorate all of you Kossacks who participated in NaNoWriMo in any capacity, as well as the Kossacks who offered their well wishes and suggestions. For NaNoWriMo writers who beat the 50,000-word mark, my biggest congratulations -- you did it! If you came up short, that's okay. Even getting to 20,000 or 30,000 words is a lot of work in one month. And even if you started but then stopped mid-month, well, it's never too late to go back and work on it later. Plus, you can always set a goal of participating in the next NaNoWriMo challenge and completing it.
Thanks for reading. Peace to all.