National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 12

by Karen Harrington

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

If you are someone who attempts to write a novel in thirty days, this sentiment applies to you. Yours truly is feeling very schizophrenic today.

Why? Because I have multiple good and evil characters competing for space in my brain’s hard drive and I am telling them to speed things up so I can cross the finish line for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by November 30th.

If you’ve been following the plot of No Teddy Bears, you know I have a story about four orphans whose parents died, leaving them in the foster care system. A former neighbor decides to host the children in her home for a two-week holiday break – but her intentions are anything but charitable. She wants to collect the money from the foster care system to buy presents for herself and her bratty son.

I’ve worked on No Teddy Bears for eleven days and just achieved 25,000 of the required 50,000 words. Not bad considering I’m starting to feel the creep of holiday gift buying pressure and the pull to reorganize my closet.

The initial steam of inspiration petered out a couple of days ago. My inner writer broke a major rule of NaNoWriMo and EDITED. I went back and bulked up a chapter that I thought needed more heft (read: word count). Specifically, a scene in which my four orphan children break into a locked and dark library. Think the 1980s movie The Breakfast Club only with six to eight year olds climbing the bookcases, misusing the copy machine and being as loud as possible just because they can. Until the lights suddenly come on and . . .

Despite these barriers, I learned two important things:

NUMERO UNO
• Writing in the genre of young adult fiction has the interesting benefit of writing few or no internal monologues. This type of writing is a real no-no for some fiction aficionados, despite its proliferation in most novels. And I’m as guilty as anyone by having my characters bow into one too many long reminiscences about how “The yawning sunset made him think about the time he and Mary first kissed. He thought how nice it would be to have that day back again….” BORING!! Okay, maybe that’s good sometimes, but I didn’t realize until this project that I lean into those episodes more than I should. My orphans are putting an end to this habit. You cannot write those types of inner thoughts for young children because they don’t sit and ponder. They wonder. It doesn’t take long before their wondering turns to action or shows up in the questions they ask grown ups.

NUMERO DOS
• I am more conscious about having each chapter filled with conflict so I can have as much of the above mentioned action taking place. I am ending each chapter with the omniscient narrator having knowledge of something foreboding. I don’t know if this builds the tension or not, but it gives this lazy writer a great springboard into the following chapter. (And it’s going to be heck to edit this novel later because, well, character motivations have largely been tossed out the window. If I want them to photocopy their bum, they will photocopy their bum.)

With the steam gone, I am now into the pure, hard, decidedly unfun work of a novelist. Sit down and write. Write anything. Write a lot of crap. Out of 1,000 words, accept that 995 of them will be a mix of crap and adverbs.

Back to it.

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Karen Harrington is the author of the upcoming novel JANEOLOGY. Visit www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor for more information.