Shake Me For Service: National Novel Writing Month and a Challenge from Yours Truly

National Novel Writing Month bills itself as "thirty days of literary abandon."  I like that.  I would like to add, as someone who stands in supreme awe of anyone who can write 50,000 words in a single month, that NaNoWriMo is a challenge for the extremely brave, the highly disciplined, and the bold of heart.  Within this month, entire worlds will be created, characters revealed, plots escalated.  As someone who can get caught in the tangle of a single paragraph for hours (okay, sometimes days) I do not know how this gets done.

The point of NaNo is to get a first draft done.  To make the broad strokes, to test an idea.  But what happens after those first 50,000 words are inked (or dotted), is, in my mind, even more crucial.  It's during revision that the music of a story is found, the real meaning, the finer possibilities.  It is during revision that the actual story emerges.

I care perhaps too much about language.  I want to take risks with it, yearn to push it.  I will write, for example, an Emmy character in You Are My Only who doesn't speak with ordinary cadence and doesn't read the world through cliches, because I think we have a responsibility as writers not just to tell stories, but to try to tell stories artfully, with originality and daring.  I will spend ten years working the sentences of Small Damages because I cannot let those gypsies, that south of Spain, that music, that old cook down.  I recognize that I am in a growing minority.  I recognize that what is art to me could be just so many plot-obstructing words to another.  I recognize that my passion for words, my own preference for authors who make sentences that are not just compelling and clear, but startling and fresh, is Beth showing her quirky stubborn side.

Still, I am in that constant hunt for a real writer writing.  I will fill my shelves with Julie Otsuka, Julian Barnes, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Enright, William Fiennes, Chloe Aridjis, Kim Echlin, Jane Mendelsohn, Ron Hansen, Colm Toibin, Colum McCann, Per Petterson, and so many more (and here I have purposefully not included any of my friends, so that you can be assured I am being completely objective) because I am inspired and informed and given hope by their commitment to the pure, hard jewel of the single sentence.

It has taken me four paragraphs to get to the point.  My point is this.  I am running a contest.  I am seeking, from the NaNo writers, this:  A single sentence as it was first written in the heat of a NaNo moment, and that same sentence after it has been reconsidered, revised.  Please send your entries to kephartblog AT comcast DOT net before December 20.  I will list my favorite transformations here and give the winner a signed copy of either a You Are My Only hardcover or an ARC of Small Damages, my novel due out from Philomel next July.  (The winner will choose.)

I hope that those of you who are so inclined will help me spread the news.

For more posts on (and examples of) the making of sentences, click here, here, and here.