These days I don’t think I could do a story that was sixty thousand words long and even if I did think I could do a story that long I don’t pretend that anyone but myself would enjoy it, or honestly even be able to wade through the whole thing since I do sometimes tend to go off on some pretty strange tangents and wind myself up and down and in and out like a wicker chair of language and wicked stare of mangled metaphors and mixed sentiment but not like mixed drinks which I have heard are actually pretty good if you want to get seriously twisted and know out some good prose although I think Kerouac did On The Road on only coffee and then I wonder where my good coffee thermos is, the one that really works as well as the other should except the other is a cheap chinese knock off of an American original and then I remember that everyone wants to write the great American novel and that November is the perfect month for doing it unless, of course, you have a job or children or a house that needs to be cleaned or you are just a general slackass like myself who couldn’t possibly string together sixty thousand words into anything cohesive unless he was tied to a chair and forced to translate the works of Dan Brown into English and that task seems like it would be better suited to someone with more of a taste for self-flagellation than even I could muster on a good day in November when I am not busy cleaning a house or watching children or working or looking for work and I think actually, now that I think about it, that maybe that was the reason that I never finished my novel five years ago and that would be the reason: I was just getting back to a working situation after having spent several months laid up with an injury to not just my back but also to my pride and my ego and it prevents me even to this day from writing as clearly as I want to sometimes when I want to write and right now I don’t even think it would be right for me to consider writing when there are so many other productive things I could be doing in the world…like laundry.
Yeah, but think of all the periods they would save printing you.
I’ve done it twice. The first time I produced about 15,000 words; the second time about 35,000. But I have yet to go back and reread/edit to see if there’s anything worthwhile in the drivel.
I think it’s an interesting challenge, and I’ve heard of a couple writers who did produce decent, publishable work in their month of November writing.
What I’m aiming for is to get the skeleton of a good story down on paper, then really start working things out after November. I’m going on vacation next week, and I’m writing character bios as well as coming up with the outline of the story. So we’ll see what happens there.
