Will the end ever come?
I’m feeling under pressure at the moment. In terms of picking up new books, I finished my reading challenge at the beginning of October. But I can’t finally tick it off (or read anything else with a clear conscience) until I have finished part two of Don Quixote. And, don’t get me wrong. It’s an excellent book – knockabout, funny, entertaining and with a very quick succession of scene changes to keep me involved.
It’s just that, at more than 500 pages of closely-set text (and that’s just part two; part one was about the same length) it feels like an equivalent commitment to taking out a mortgage – one that could easily take me 25 years to fulfil. I’m currently on something like page 850 – and really keen to finish so that I can say that I wound up the challenge in October.
But there’s another reason why it’s desperately important I get this project out of the way before November 1. Here it is:
To the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month (which might more accurately, I suppose, be called International Novella Writing Month – but who’s counting) does exactly what it says on the tin. A large number of insane people from around the world undertake to write a 50,000-word work of prose, from scratch, between midnight on November 1 and midnight on November 30. That involves, in case you like statistics, producing 1,667 words every day during November. My sanity is so far in question that this is my third year of attempting it.
In 2004 and 2005 I set out to write over-ambitious thrillers and ended up with c. 35,000 words and c. 36,000 words respectively. This year my plans are a bit different – to take one of my pre-existing characters and write down a significant chunk of backstory. Unlike the previous two years I have done lots of planning and, unlike the previous two years, the story I want to tell is around 50,000 words long as opposed to something like 150,000. So I am reasonably hopeful. In fact, like everyone else taking part in what is the year’s major creative event for so many of us, I just want to get on with it.
Time to sit down and get the dear old Don to move over…