Tuesday, November 27, 2007
(1:45 PM) | Brad:
Writing a Novel in Four Weeks
This month, as you may know, is National Novel Writing Month. Being basically unemployed, and having completed the writing and publishing projects that had consumed my time for months, I figured I'd give it a shot. My first thought was an epic erotic poem. Not enough epic poetry written these days, and certainly not erotic poetry. In fits and starts, grunts and gasps, I made my way through a series of jaw-dropping stanzas. Write-in participants swooned at the ever-expanding girth of my word count. And then, as quickly as it began, I was finished. Done before the story was. One week into November.The next week I began a new story. This time, I decided to go Gothic. Conjure up a little modern Poe, perhaps. If we cannot satisfy our readers' sexual appetites, we'll make them curl into a ball on their bed, screaming into the pristine-clean sheets, biting their pillow. The result: a simple story of a preacher who loves his only son, but on occasion beats him silly -- claiming later to be possessed. The son loves his father, believes him and decides that accepting his Satanic beating would be the ultimate act of love for his possessed father. I quickly realized , within a week, that this was perhaps a bit maudlin, and certainly didn't have the wheels for 70K words.
The third week I devoted to a a not-so-distant not-quite dystopian future, in which the middle class has not so much revolted as gone insane. Their employers, recognizing the high cost of fuel, and succumbing to governmental pressure to "Go Green," have granted their employees a wish: work from home. The only problem, these same employees, who are no longer able to afford the appearance of luxury promised to them by the late-20th/early-21st century, have become slaves to their suburban homes and the gadgets they've amassed. With no refuge from what they've gathered for themselves, one couple systematically destroys their possessions in increasingly creative ways -- discussing the beauty of burning HDTVs, cooking IPods while they play in their portable Bose players, and disassembling SUVS and using the parts to create a totem commemorating Mammon's death.
But then I decided this week I instead wanted to write something more socially relevant. So, this week I've poured myself into a writing a screenplay about a chef who loves his food creations so much that he cannot bear to have them eaten. So, in a madcap comedy he has to figure out a way to keep his job as a lead chef by serving somebody else's food. Finally, through a series of hilarious events, he decides to try some of his own cooking. He dies from salmonella-poisoning.
