Tuesday, October 26, 2004
No Plot? No Problem!
In Biz Stone's column on National Novel Writing Month and writing a novel using a blog, he mentioned Chris Baty's book, No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. I looked it up on Amazon, and I'm thinking of picking up a copy of it.
While writing a novel in a month's time comes off as quite a big undertaking, it doesn't really seem too big. I've known people that have engaged in the weekend novel writing challenges and come out with rough drafts of their novels. Back in college, I read about a guy in South America who wrote all kinds of westerns and action novels under various pseudonyms. The guy had hundreds of pulp novels on the market, and he was a master at pounding these things out in a day.
Yeah, that's right. He wrote novels in a day. Granted, they were pulpy, and they were short novels (about the size of Louis L'Amour's short novels or a small Harlequin romance), but he still was able to do it. I remember in the article, which I wish I could find (it's probably buried in all of my college crap), the reporter asked the guy how he gets through writing blocks. I believe the guy's answer was: "Dynamite." Essentially, when he came to an impasse in the story, he blew something up, which shuffled the story along into something else.
Hmm... All this talk of pulp novels and crap has me thinking I might just grab Baty's book and give this thirty-day novel thingie a try. To keep things going, I might even go the blog route. I could think of it as a serialized novel, and if a couple of my friends read it, they'd probably give me shit when I wasn't producing fast enough. Tempting. :-/
While writing a novel in a month's time comes off as quite a big undertaking, it doesn't really seem too big. I've known people that have engaged in the weekend novel writing challenges and come out with rough drafts of their novels. Back in college, I read about a guy in South America who wrote all kinds of westerns and action novels under various pseudonyms. The guy had hundreds of pulp novels on the market, and he was a master at pounding these things out in a day.
Yeah, that's right. He wrote novels in a day. Granted, they were pulpy, and they were short novels (about the size of Louis L'Amour's short novels or a small Harlequin romance), but he still was able to do it. I remember in the article, which I wish I could find (it's probably buried in all of my college crap), the reporter asked the guy how he gets through writing blocks. I believe the guy's answer was: "Dynamite." Essentially, when he came to an impasse in the story, he blew something up, which shuffled the story along into something else.
Hmm... All this talk of pulp novels and crap has me thinking I might just grab Baty's book and give this thirty-day novel thingie a try. To keep things going, I might even go the blog route. I could think of it as a serialized novel, and if a couple of my friends read it, they'd probably give me shit when I wasn't producing fast enough. Tempting. :-/
// posted by Chris @ 1:47 PM 
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