Because You Have To

“Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?” It’s a nearly
inevitable question at author readings, often preceded by an overlong
description of the epic novel/memoir/free-verse poem that the
questioner has been working on for the past decade. Every author’s
response is a little bit different: Chuck Palahniuk, for instance,
usually takes the question seriously, providing a sincere, detailed
description of his process, but other authors emphasize some tiny part
of their writing technique to the point of self-hagiography, making
themselves sound like preternaturally gifted conductors of rhythm and
cadence.

The truth of the matter is much simpler than all that. If you want
to know how to become a writer, this is the answer: You have to write.
A lot. Jeff Lawshe is one of thousands of writers who produced tens of
thousands of words (specifically, 123 double-spaced pages) over Labor
Day weekend as part of the 32nd Annual 3-Day Novel Contest. Lawshe, an
internet marketing writer, had always wanted to be a novelist, but he
hadn’t produced much of anything in 13 years. The almost impossibly
short 72-hour deadline shook him out of his creative coma and forced
him into action. He describes the resulting novel, titled Earth’s
Imago, as “a post-apocalyptic eco-political sci-fi horror romance”
involving “humanitarian clones” battling with “de-evolved cannibal
humans.”

The looming deadline inspired Lawshe to stop thinking about things
like “probability and reality” and just “go with something that felt a
lot more like playing make-believe when I was a kid.” As if the novel
wasn’t enough, Lawshe kept a blog (www.modularstories.blogspot.com)
detailing the weird revelations that erupt from high-speed noveling
(sample sentences: “How did this happen? HOW DID I END UP WRITING A
ZOMBIE NOVEL?!!!”). But it wasn’t all childish fancy. He learned about
storytelling, too, especially while figuring out how to shape huge
swaths of exposition into something that wouldn’t put a reader to
sleep. In the days since, he’s become more aware of the techniques
other writers use to put their stories together.

It’s only after you produce the draft that serious editing becomes
an issue. The winner of the 3-Day Novel Contest—this year’s
winner will be announced in January—is ultimately edited and
published under the 3-Day Books imprint. But you don’t have to win to
be published: Corey Redekop is a librarian whose losing entry in the
3-Day Novel Contest, titled Shelf Monkey, was ultimately
published by ECW Press in 2007. During the publication process,
Monkey, the story of a corporate mega-bookstore employee who
butts heads with a talk-show host “whose wildly popular book club is
progressively lowering the I.Q. of North America,” grew from its
three-day birth weight of 22,000 words to about 60,000.

“The basic structure did not change, it was just broadened,” Redekop
says. “I worked on some of the secondary characters and gradually began
to see themes I had not realized were present before.” Redekop also had
to change the ending of the book: In the three-day version of
Monkey, every character died at the end—”When you’re
pressed for time, kill everybody off,” he advises, “it’s an easy
out”—but his first readers, including novelist Miriam Toews,
convinced him to lower the body count. Redekop is all right with the
decision, although he says, “Part of me still wishes I had kept the
original ending, because it ended on a joke that I still find
funny.”

Contests like the 3-Day Novel Contest and the much less competitive
National Novel Writing Month in November do a genuine, generous service
for aspiring authors by providing compelling (if entirely artificial)
deadlines and introducing them to the concept that words and ideas are
easy to come by (and equally easy to abandon) in the quest for a novel.
It’s the idea of writing that drives most writers (like Lawshe,
who laments his pre-contest “chronic procrastination syndrome”) into
years of inaction. After they’ve learned that important lesson about
the mundaneness of the writing process and the importance of actually
sitting down and writing—only then can writers get into the
business of honing their words into something beautiful.

Most published authors are so incompetent at answering the question
of how to write that it can sometimes seem like a smoke screen, meant
to protect those within the gates of publishing from the barbarians in
the audience. But Lawshe points out that these contests create more
sympathetic readers, too; he’s more likely to forgive writerly flaws in
books and movies because he’s experienced similar problems as a
novelist. “It’s tough out there in the middle of fantasy land,” he
says.