Write a Novel in a Month! Are You Crazy?

At the urging of my brother, I joined the nanowrimo challenge to write a novel in a month during November. Today is crunch day and I have 3,000 words left which is a pretty easy target for the day. Of course, you come out not with a completed novel, but with a first draft. This may be the dumbest thing I've ever written; I'm not confident that it's any good at all but it's been an interesting exercise. Besides writing is never a waste, it's good practice.

But a funny thing happened to me on the way to a plot. At the end of October I was wondering what I could possibly write about. I know so little about almost everything and then the lightbulb went on. I know a lot about right-to-life issues. I'd have a guy in a coma whom everyone considered unconscious who heard everything that was going on. I wrote the first chapter with him observing what was happening in the room and decided it would be hard to write an entire first-person novel that was limited to a hospital room or what others said in a hospital room. So that led me to go back and forth between a first person narrator who is essentially invisible to everyone around him and a third person narrative for the other chapters.

About three weeks into the writing I had a Twilight Zone experience when the story broke about Rom Houban, the man who's been in a coma for two decades and was awake and aware the entire time even though his body was paralyzed and he'd been designated a vegetable. (Children, pay attention. I am holding a carrot. It is a vegetable. Little Johnny, please come to the front of the room. Now, Class, can you tell the difference between the carrot and Johnny? Very good! You are smarter than many doctors!)

Talk about eerie. I had my Rom Houban even before I knew there was a Rom Houban.

At that point I was way behind in word count, but Houban's story gave me the incentive to continue writing. It's been an interesting exercise since I mostly write non-fiction. I never thought I could even begin to write a novel - even a bad one. I started out with about a dozen characters in search of a plot which developed as I wrote. The characters seemed to take on a life of their own in fact. Some I liked and some I thought I liked until they did something despicable. (Wow! I didn't know he was capable of that. What a creep!)

It gave my husband and me interesting dinner conversation for the month. What exactly am I writing about anyway? Shall I turn it into a murder mystery with the main character killed by morphine in the IV? Will his son and his sister sue the wife to get his medical power of attorney so they can cut off food and water? And what happened to the youngest daughter who went back to school in the second chapter and just disappeared from the book?

Well, I'm down to the wire so I'd better get back to it. I still can't believe I'm going to finish since I had grandkids for a four day weekend mid-month and a houseful for four days at Thanksgiving. But the end is in sight and I'm a fast writer so unless lightening strikes my computer I'm confident I'll be done long before the deadline at midnight.

And even if I never publish it I can check "write a novel" off my to-do-before-I-die list.