The Write Time

In The Sandman, a comicbook series written by Neil Gaiman, there is a character named Lucien who tends a supernatural library filled with books that are dreamt of, but never written. Next month the library is going to get raided.

November is National Novel Writing Month... NaNoWriMo, for short. It's an event in which the participants will each devote their free time for one month to the task of writing a complete 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be the Great American Novel. It doesn't even have to be good. It just has to be 50,000 words, and it has to be started and finished in November.

I think it's a brilliant idea. There are so many people who keep telling themselves that "someday" they're going to write a book, but never actually sit down and start it. And there are those who've started, but have been dragging the process along for so bloody long that they'll probably never finish. NaNoWriMo offers a gentle kick in the head for either kind of person.

There are some who scoff and sneer at this challenge, complaining that it encourages mediocrity. But you know, it's easier to fix a poorly written first draft of a novel than it is to fix a blank ream of paper or an empty diskette. And even if the product of a month's writing ends up sitting untouched and unread from December onward, it's still a worthwhile exercise. The way to get good at writing is to write, and participating in NaNoWriMo would force you to do just that.

I do have to admit that I won't be participating myself. For one thing, my free time for the next month or several is pretty much spoken for... and since some of those commitments may put much-needed money in my (creditors') pockets, they have to take priority. And to be honest, I don't think I have any novels in me. I'm more inclined toward graphic novels (long-form comics), which are in many ways a very different medium. I want to tell stories with pictures, and a simple translation of 50,000 words to 50 pictures doesn't work.

Instead, I'll be participating in a similar challenge next April: 24 Hour Comics Day. It doesn't last as long as NaNoWriMo, but it's more intense, requiring the cartoonist to produce a complete 24-page story - plot, script, finished art, word balloons, captions - in 24 hours. To put that into perspective, a busy comics writer generally produces maybe four such scripts in a month. A typical comics penciler does one page a day... and that's not even counting the time somebody else then spends inking it, lettering it, and so on. Do the math and you'll see that it's insane to think that one person working alone could produce a professional-quality 24-page comic in 24 hours.

But that's not the point. The point, again, is to get the juices flowing, to get something out of your head and onto paper. For pros like the ones described above, it means throwing their usual self-critical analysis out the window and just creating. For amateurs like me it's mostly about the same old issues of getting started on something, and getting it finished. I'm a pathological procrastinator and perfectionist, so I need that. Badly.

In the meantime, I'm giving myself a little challenge of sorts to get my pencil moving a bit more. This whole blog thingy is here to get me writing more (opinion, not fiction), and it's working nicely, thanks. But I'm still not drawing like I need to be. So, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the photo/graphic images I've been decorating my weblog entries with, I'm going to be illustrating them. Some of these illos might possibly be works of expressive genius and exquisite craft, some will definitely be hasty scribbles. But what matters is that I'm doing them. And with each one I do, that's one more piece rescued from the "Art" section of Lucien's library.