First Hurdle Crossed: Is This the Beginning?

I am thrilled to report that all four of the MA students in our Novel-in-One-Semester class have met the word count of 3,000 words set for Week 1. Two of them have surpassed that goal. If they were motivated not by pure inspiration but by the hope of getting ahead so they don't fall short in the future, that's okay by me. 

Because there's nothing like a deadline. 

As I can attest myself. It's this past Saturday, noon-ish: I've cooked American pancakes with Canadian maple syrup for my English household. I'm feeling lazy and sleepy, but I have made a pledge to revise 3,000 words.  I'm the tutor.  I cannot walk into class not having met my side of the bargain. 

And so, I worked that day and Sunday evening to finish revising about 4,200 words.  I've made real changes, had probitive thoughts about the novel in the big picture. 

Now, in addition to having completed the next draft of this chapter, I also feel virtuous. 

And you? Our online community has grown to include English and Creative Writing BA students at Winchester, one of whom has already sent me an email, and a former student from Washington, D.C.  I've encouraged them, and you, to share your thoughts about novel writing on this blog.  A person I do not know has already posted wise words -- who is Rich Rowe? 

I do know this.  In Winchester, Sharon wrote 6,000 words; Tim came in with 17,000 but fessed up to having 13,500 done before the module started; Ian penned 2,600 for  Chapter 1 and another 600 in notes; Michelle did her 3,000 or thereabouts.  They've all written what might be a beginning. 

In class, we looked at beginnings.  Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (look at the simple, effective structure, each character introduced in Chapter 1 before they all come together in Chapter 2); Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (so different, with his careful pace and language some found too beautiful, and yet, look, he is also establishing characters who will come together as the book progresses); John Casey's Spartina (his blunt sentences a welcome change, and how succinctly he tells us how much trouble his protagonist Dick Pierce is in when Casey writes, as an aside: "That was when Dick still had his phone.") 

What is established in these beginnings?  A world.  We are submerged in a world. 

Perhaps that is what we must do at the beginning of a novel.  Create a world. 

Even if we aren't really writing the beginning, yet. 

 

40,000 Words in Twelve Weeks a.k.a. Are We Crazy?

Sept. 29, 2008 -- Yes.
Ready?

The best way to learn how to write is by writing. Any poet, fiction writer, or memoirist will say the same, but for a novelist, this is especially true. To reach a bare minimum of 40,000 words, you must put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, again and again and again.

And this is what we are about to do at a novel writing class at the University of Winchester MA Programme in Creative and Critical Writing. Write.

There are just four students signed up for this class in the south of England. By next week, they'll be bringing into class 3,000 words. I'm in the middle of a novel, so I've promised to edit as many words as they write afresh.

We will not expect beautiful prose, though some beautiful prose will, I suspect, emerge. We will not expect a perfect structure, although structure, once we have a whole, will slowly (or precipitously) take shape. Characters will begin as pale shadows in dark corners, then walk out confidently into the sunshine by word 12, 587 (I predict) and make themselves known. Grand ideas they start with may go by the wayside but be replaced by more subtle, apt themes that they recognize on page 111 and realize that, once they’re done, they will have to imbue into p. 1. The beginning may stick, or it may go. They may know the end and keep to it, or the end may be uncertain until they write it – then change again. And the middle will not likely be the natural progression that they aim for, at least not yet.

But they will not know any of this until they write this lowly, sloppy, feeling-in-the-dark first draft. It will be a wonderful mess.

At the end, students will be marked on a short bit of the novel, which they will polish in January. How sharp their vision may be then! And we will read, read, read to analyze how in the world other novelists do it.

But mostly, we will write. In the words of Roethke,

I learn by going where I have to go.