Reduce, reuse, recycle, rewrite

11/1/09 Two early drafts of Catalyst, recycled

You want to write a novel. You plan to write a novel. You're just not sure when it will happen.

I think you should make it happen this month.

November is National Novel Writing Month. It's one of the truly great ideas, and as soon as I heard about it, I knew I had to do it. Here's the skinny: write a novel, start to finish, in thirty-one days. The goal is 50,000 words, which is roughly equivalent to Brave New World or Catcher in the Rye. National Novel Writing Month is all about quantity, not quality. Get it down on the page, worry about how it reads later. Check out the NaNoWriMo web site for details.

I first attempted it in November, 2006. I wrote early in the morning, late at night. I wrote in the back seat of a minivan on the way to a conference in Providence. I wrote after Thanksgiving dinner at Joanna's family house. I wrote after school and in fits and starts every Saturday and Sunday.

To make it to 50,000, I had to average 1,613 words per day. That's a lot of writing.

Out of a month of furious typing emerged a very rough draft of Catalyst. Joanna and my great friends Chris and Juliane served as editors, giving me constructive and helpful feedback. Such as: "It's great, Reed. Just completely change the ending."

Uh, okay.

They were right, of course, and the finished work was published in September 2007. Do the math: it took thirty-one days to write the book and ten months to revise it.

The real beauty of it is that once you get your novel written, you can get it published for free. FOR FREE!!! Cool, huh? There are a number of online publishing companies. I used Lulu.com. It costs nothing to upload your book, you just pay when you want to order a copy. No minimum order. That's good, since Catalyst has yet to become a best seller. (Feel free to help by buying it here.) It'll go viral at any moment, I'm sure.

And so will yours.

Get writing, you've only got thirty days left.