Writers, take your mark…

By Tamara Lee

Just as the NaNoWriMo start-off gun is being pulled from its holster (or however that image goes; I’m a city-slicker Canadian, so gun metaphors aren’t second nature to me), I am going over some of the outline notes I made earlier this month.

One of the exercises had me prepare a list of memorable novels I’ve read this year, the idea being that they are representative of the kind of novel I should be trying to write in November. Admittedly, I’m still lagging in my contemporary reading, but Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburg and Ann Patchett’s The Magician’s Assistant would top the list of novels I read this year that made me immediately want to relive the experience. Full of dark humour and memorable characters with a smattering of lyricism, it’s not hard to understand why those novels appeal, at least to me.

But when I recalled the novels I didn’t enjoy all that much, in particular Zadie Smith’s epic, White Teeth and Richard Russo's Empire Falls, I realised my dissatisfaction says a lot about what I want out of my own writing.

With both these novels, I spent nearly a month trying to care about the characters, at least enough to make it to the finish line. I'd get through a chapter or two every night until I started to see a dent finally had been made, thereby committing me to the project of finishing what I started. Smith's felt like two novels, and I preferred the second one, and Russo's meandering plot has not felt Twain-y to me in any way, as the blurbs and reviews had instructed me to feel. In fact, I’m still struggling with Empire Falls, but the other night an especially hilarious learning-to-drive scene rejuvenated my interest in the book. That’s the Russo-writing of Straight Man I was initially hoping to find.

It’s not really the massive size of these novels that deters me, it's just that, well, did they really need to be so lengthy? Did the characters lumbering through their misery really need to take so long to get winded? I’m not slim-novel obsessed, honest. Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here is gigantic, and I wanted it to go on and on; I wanted to live with that crazy clan, and watch them every day outside my window, doing anything, even washing their cars. I just wanted to keep going.

Quality over quantity; give me some poetry, some wit, some characters to whom I can secretly relate. This is what makes me turn pages. Not scene after scene somehow begging to be scanned over. I used to feel guilty skipping over a paragraph here and there, like I was taking a forbidden short-cut. But I don't feel that way anymore. Better to have finished the race than to have quit it entirely.

Of course, everyone’s criteria for motivating novels is different, but with one month to try to write 50,000 words, or damage an appendage trying, if I’m not writing what I want to read, why bother showing up to the starting line at all?