When I first started doing NaNoWriMo, a friend of mind sort
of scoffed, saying it was impossible to write a novel in one month. She was right, of course. You don’t just sit down on November 1,
start hammering away at a keyboard, and get up on November 30 with a completed
novel on your hard drive. But it
is possible to write a first draft of a novel in a month. At the very least, it is possible to
write a collection of 50,000 or more words (the length of a short novel) in a
month. What one does with it after
that is up to him or her.
After my first NaNoWriMo experience, in 2006, I felt an
amazing sense of accomplishment, having dashed off (over a month…maybe not
dashed off, but anyway…) the longest piece of cohesive writing I had ever
done, short of my Master’s thesis.
In many ways, it was more of a challenge (and more cohesive) than my
Master’s thesis. However, I knew
when I was done that I had a creature with a host of warts. There were unresolved plot points,
random digressions, fake chapters, all in the name of getting finished. When forcing myself to produce words,
only thinking about getting something on the page, completing my goal for the
night, the week, the month, I let logic and any idea of an end result go. It was far more important to get the
novel written than it was to make sure it was in something close to a polished
state. That is what drafting
is. The experience of
participating in this madness reminds me of what the writing process really is,
and it helps me, I believe, be a better writing coach to my students.
It is one of the hardest things to do with young writers,
getting them to forget about the end product and to just write. It is
understandable. I am asking them to engage in a certain action to perform a
particular task. They know that I
will be evaluating their published draft.
It will be consumed, weighed, assessed, and assigned a value. This is an A, this a B, and so on. It is school writing. But their best writing always comes from
some other, more personal place.
After all, I don’t enjoy NaNoWriMo because my draft will be evaluated at
the end. Hell, no one has even
seen either of the novel drafts I have written in the last six years. Not even a paragraph. But, I want them
to engage in the writing process without the goal in mind. (It is perhaps more
accurate to say “the goal they set for themselves,” since, really, my goal is
not to assess them—I would rather never put a grade on another paper again as
long as I live. My goal is to have them learn, through experience, how to
effectively communicate their ideas through writing. It is only a necessity of
the system of education we have that that learning is expected to have a letter
assigned to it that more or less reflects student learning and standing when
compared to standards and (don’t tell anybody) other students. After all, why
have class rank if you are not comparing students to each other…but I digress.)
It really is a kind of Zen exercise, writing without the
goal in mind. Once a student sits
down with a vision of what an essay should be, it influences every choice they
make, and it is nearly impossible for them to write honestly about what is
important to them, or at least what is worthwhile to them to say. And who can
blame them for considering the end before they even imagine their beginnings?
So, I try to build assignments in such a way that students can arrive at topics
that are meaningful to them by giving them choice and open-ended prompts. I try
to constantly remind them not to worry about questions like “How do I start
this essay?” Frustratingly for them, my most common answer to such a question
is, “You start by writing.” Or, “Start at the beginning.” There are always those
kids so wrapped up in the rubric or their grade that it takes a short
conference on strategies for introductions. And, honestly, I hate having that conversation. What I really want students to do is to
just sit down and start making that music that I love to hear, the tick tack
tick of the keyboard being exercised.
For that is how the process begins, not by writing an
awesome attention getting sentence that takes a student twenty-five minutes to
write and agonize over and edit and rewrite and delete and start again. After a class period, she might have a
really excellent pair of sentences, but she hasn’t really been writing. Not really. She’s been practicing
building sentences, or fitting her words into a structure that she thinks is
what writing should be. What I
would like her to realize is that writing is messy, that first drafts always
suck, that you can’t write a novel in a month, but you can have a hell of a
time grinding out a first draft.
And then, she can go back and excise the dead weight, add in
some detail, shore up a shaky foundation.
I have been slowly revising an ancient draft for six years. Of course,
one might say, a student doesn’t have six years. That’s true.
But we aren’t asking him to revise 50,000 words.
Sometimes, one of my kiddos gets it. Sometimes, like today, I say, “Start at
the beginning,” and she does. And, as she works her way through that mess that
she is slapping down on the page, I watch her struggling. But I can tell she is
not struggling with the writing. She is struggling with the natural tendency to
fix something and with the tendency to ask me if a paragraph or a choice she
has made is “alright.” I sense that she really wants to, but she doesn’t. That’s when I know that she really is
engaging with the first stage of the writing process.
Which is exactly what I will be doing, again, when all the
little ghouls and goblins wake up on All Saints Day and realize they have eaten
way too many Butterfingers the night before. I will be engaging in the first stage of the writing
process, and, if I am lucky, when the last of the turkey and stuffing leftovers
are consumed and Santa Claus has strolled down Fifth Avenue once again, I just
might have another massively problematic first draft that will take me a lifetime
to fix.
By the way, if you are interested in joining me on this
fabulously maddening writing adventure, go to the Office of Letters and Light
website and look me up, my username is underdog30.
