Saturday, February 5, 2011

In which I decide to write a novel, starting tomorrow

For some time, I've wanted to write a novel.  Or maybe I've wanted to have written a novel.  Anyway, the idea of writing and then having written a novel seems cool to me, despite the glut of novels and the questionable worth of any and all of them.  But I've read a lot of novels, so maybe I'll just write one, thought me.

And I thought about doing that National Novel-Writing Month thing.  In fact I read the book on that thing. And for that they have you doing 2,000 words per day, aka more time than I'm going to spare on a typical day.  I'm not doing writing full-time.  I'm not even doing writing NaNoWriMo-time.

And I started a sort of series of connected short scenes that could possibly develop into some sort of novel, the one about the kids who nuke Jerusalem, but each individual scene takes a while to write, and I did like eight of them but haven't gone back to it in months.

So on the train today I was thinking, if I just knew what to write at each point of the story, I could do a tiny little bit every day and then in the end it would be all done.  But how to plot out that whole story and break it down into tiny enough pieces?

The solution I have arrived at is this: I will write a novel called "Minute."  It starts at 7:00AM when the main character, Aaron (a fictional composite character based on myself) hears his alarm go off.  Every day I will write about only what happens in the next minute of Aaron's day.  If Aaron is around until 10PM, that's 900 minutes.  If I write 100 words for every minute, that's 90,000 words, which is a good-size novel.  And of course it takes 900 days to write - some two and a half years.  I'm not too worried about there being some big plot.  It's just a day, minute by minute.  It's kind of like that guy who took a picture of himself once a day for a long time.  Sort of.  And I can publish the next minute every day online, which motivates me to write anyway.

I think this is the plan.

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