No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (8 page)

“It’s the laptop people!” one waitress would eventually call excitedly whenever we came in. We did get some strange looks from regulars at times, but mostly we were happily left alone to stare intently at our laptop screens while sipping our Guinness.

If you’re looking for a truly anything-goes bar environment, try a hotel bar lounge. The stomping grounds of perpetually overworked (and perpetually working) business travelers, hotel bars are laptopfriendly, open late, and offer novelists a front-row seat on the kinds of activities that have filled great novels for centuries: nefarious deals, shady alliances, and steamy, illicit affairs—all accompanied by the salty perk of free cocktail nuts.

-------------------THE WONDERS OF COFFEE

Ah, sweet caffeine. If you ever needed any proof that coffee was the wonder drug for novelists everywhere, you won’t after next month. Whether you French press it, filter brew it, or buy it in steaming cups from your neighborhood coffeemoger, you will be thankful you have buckets of the bean on hand during your noveling adventure.

Scientists who have studied caffeine’s effects on humans have discovered that the drug only takes a few minutes to spread to nearly every cell in the body. It’s also a natural antidepressant, elevating moods for up to eight hours per cup. And coffee contains antioxidants whose healthful effects rival those produced naturally by the body.

Coffee’s history is a novel in its own right: The drink was first served in Ethiopia, where the leaves, not the beans, were brewed as a tea. Eventually the Yemenis got hold of the magic bean juice, and the coffee craze spread throughout the Arab world and beyond. Sort of. The Yemeni rulers forbade the export of unsterilized beans to the outside world, so supplies remained limited until Dutch traders absconded with a sapling in 1616, raising the purloined plant’s offspring in Ceylon. Soon thereafter, the Dutch colonies of Java, Sumatra, and Bali were overflowing with coffee beans and java junkies the world over breathed a sigh of ecstatic relief. Over time, the destinies of Haiti, Brazil, and Guatemala have each been radically altered because of their connections to the crop, with the commodity bringing about everything from slave uprisings to political revolutions to utter economic collapse. All part of the rich legacy of brewed novelist-helper that you’re sipping today .

Bottoms up!

--------------------

THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Speaking of snacks! There are a few things you’ll need to purchase for your upcoming novelist travails. Like any good vacation, half the fun of writing a novel is getting properly outfitted. A month-long noveling trip requires a shopping spree every bit as enjoyable as a jaunt to the Bahamas. And if you pinch pennies, you can get all the high-tech gear, low-tech tools, and copious amounts of treats you’ll need for under $35.

The stuff you need falls neatly into two categories: things you can put in your mouth and things you shouldn’t. We’ll tackle the inedible writing tools first, and then move on to the essential snacks and drinks.

A NOTEBOOK

The universe loves novelists. During the novel-prep and book-writing period, you’ll watch, delighted, as the cosmos parts to reveal a rich vein of pilferable, copyright-free material explicitly for your noveling use.

A couple will sit down next to you on the bus and proceed to have an argument that you’ll use verbatim as a pivotal turning point in your character’s love life. Friends will tell a story about an embarrassing, misrouted email at work, and it will inspire an entire subplot. From random graffiti to raccoon-shaped clouds to heavy-metal ballads on the radio, the natural world will be flinging so many novelappropriate artifacts, phrases, and characters your way that the most difficult thing during your noveling month will not be finding inspiration but fending off an excess of it. Your notebook, the most powerful apparatus a novelist can own aside from a coffeemaker, is a bucket for catching the downpour of material the universe provides. The notebook you buy should be small enough to fit comfortably into a pocket or purse, and discreet enough for it to be wielded in public without arousing too much suspicion. Avoid brightly colored, spiral-bound notebooks, as they are prone to shedding pages and snagging on clothes.

A MAGICAL PEN

This is the peanut butter to your notebook’s jelly, and as with the notebook, it should be somewhere on your person at all times. When picking out your pen, you must be absolutely sure that you have found the right one. Don’t grab the first ballpoint that catches your eye in the office supply store. The magical pen will be both your conduit of mystery and a documenter of epiphanies. Getting the wrong pen for the job would be a disastrous start to the writing process. Try every pen available, writing phrases like

“I am an unstoppable writing dynamo” and “future bad-ass novelist” on the sample pads. After you do this for long enough, one pen candidate will rise above the rest. That enchanted implement is the one that has been slated to help you on your noveling journey.

If your workplace happens to have a broad array of pens on hand, you can save money (and a trip to the stationery store) by picking out a winner from the supply cabinet when no one’s looking. A WORD-PROCESSING DEVICE

This is the vast digital warehouse for your novel, and it will likely be the one thing on this list of musthaves that you already own. Because of their go-anywhere, can-do attitudes, laptop computers are the best tool for the job. If your laptop is somewhat past its prime, you can increase its usefulness as a noveling tool by ordering a new battery (or two) for it from online auction sites, such as Ebay. Some NaNoWriMo participants swear by an affordable machine called an Alphasmart

(www.alphasmart.com).
This is a battery-powered, word-processing device that looks like a cross between a laptop and a children’s Speak & Spell. The miniscule screen only displays four lines of text or so at a time, which can be helpful in warding off obsessive editing. The keyboard is large and comfortable, and you can work for up to 700 hours on a few AA batteries. If you’re not ready to drop a couple hundred dollars on a new machine, though, don’t worry: A desktop computer, PDA with fold-out keyboard, a even a manual typewriter will do fine. Go with whatever you have access to; NaNoWriMo participants have successfully written entire 50,000-word novels using everything from voice-recognition software to a pencil and paper.

A REFERENCE BOOK

When you start writing, you’ll find grammatical and style questions popping up immediately. Are quotes always set off from descriptive text with indents? How do you handle parenthetical comments that are actually stand-alone sentences? Are you supposed to italicize internal monologues?

A professional editor would tell you to pick up a usage guide like William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style or, even worse, the Chicago Manual of Style. I find both books to be awkwardly laid out and dangerously sleep-inducing. So in the interest of keeping momentum while I write, I keep a copy of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity close at hand to use as a template for formatting or style issues. Any book you know and love is a perfect candidate for a reference novel, but this is also a great opportunity to pamper yourself by buying a novel you’ve been wanting to read for a long time.

MUSIC

Music is the most potent writing drug available without a prescription. Before you start writing, amass as many songs as possible that might be conducive to noveling. Every novel, explicitly or not, has a soundtrack. Finding that soundtrack, and listening to novel and scene-appropriate music as you write, will help you slip into the sensual realms you’re describing. Whether you’re tapping into the hyperbolic violence of a horror novel or the prim grace of a historical romance, there’s some complementary music out there eager to help you get it written.

I’m a big fan of movie scores, as they tend to be overly dramatic in all the right ways. When your character is striding off for the final showdown with the landlord or the face-eating remora, you don’t want to have the Bee Gees cooing about dance fevers in the background. You want the epic rumble of kettle drums and the spiraling scream of an overheated string section. Yaaar!

Whatever your musical predilections, plan on creating loads of energy-bolstering mixes for your writing plunge. Or, if you have a fast Internet connection, take advantage of online radio stations such as Radio Netscape
(www.netscape.com), w
here dozens of genre-specific streams are ready to fulfill your every soundtrack whim.

-------------------HEARING VOICES: THE POWER OF HEADPHONES

When writing a novel, I always wear large, ear-covering headphones. Sometimes I even remember to plug them into my CD player.

I like wearing headphones because they help dampen the clatter of the outside world without giving me the closed-off, scuba-diver feel that earplugs tend to. And when they’re hooked up to a CD or MP3

player, headphones shove the music directly into my brain in beautiful, cinematic ways, adding lovely contours to the rough edges of my thoughts and amplifying my sentences as they come spraying out onto the page.

Headphones, with or without music, also create a social buffer around you. This is especially helpful if you are a woman trying to get your novel written in a cafe. For a certain type of gregarious person (read: man), the sight of someone with a furrowed brow typing madly on a laptop in a public place sends the following very clear message: “I am not working on anything important; please come bother me.” Headphones are the perfect foil for keeping these well-meaning, deeply annoying people at bay.

-------------------A WRITING TOTEM

Spider-Man has his tights; Wonder Woman has those bullet-deflecting bracelets. Berkeley’s Erin Allday has her fingerless gloves.

“They’re a super-cheap pair of black cotton gloves from the Gap,” the thirty-year-old, three-time NaNoWriMo winner explains. “All the fingers are uneven because I’m so bad at using scissors. I pretty much have to put them on when I get stuck working on my NaNoWriMo novel. They make me feel so old-school writerly, like I’m some struggling novelist sitting by candlelight in an apartment that I can’t afford to keep adequately heated. They definitely put me in the mood to write. It’s also a nice tactile distraction, where I’m focused on my fingers and the actual act of typing instead of staying in my head and trying to make the words sound pretty.”

As Erin can attest, you are about to spend a month living far above the realm of mere mortals, and you, too, need something you can wear to inspire your superheroic abilities. A wearable, writing-enhancing object serves several important purposes. First, it helps you transition from the world of everyday living into the fictional realms you’ve created. In the former you are a normal person, working a normal job. In the latter, you are an all-powerful deity capable of laying waste to entire cities with a few taps of the keyboard.

For me, when I don my plastic Viking helmet, I know I’ve left the real world behind and am sailing off to the shores of my fictional Valhalla. The hat reminds me that I am Elsewhere, and I will be staying there until the ship’s reserves of Dr Pepper and Starburst run low. Putting on a writing cap, cape, wig, or pantsuit will also serve to remind you that this is a fun, somewhat ridiculous creative exercise, where the goal is to spend a few weeks writing for the hell of it. For some reason, it’s hard to overthink your writing when you’re wearing a three-foot-tall Marie Antoinette wig.

Personally, I like to have several tiers of headwear, depending on how my story is coming along. If all’s well, I’ll wear my baseball hat, the ideal thinking cap for sporty, low-exertion writing. The Viking helmet is for the more complicated passages. And if things are going horribly awry in my novel, I bust out my cowboy hat, which I pull down low over my eyes in a menacing fashion to warn my uncooperative story that an unholy dose of hurt is about to be unleashed upon it if it doesn’t fall into line.

Conveniently, having something special you wear when you write provides a visual cue to anyone you’re living with, including small children, that you’ve slipped away into the shadowy Realm of the Novel, and that you are not to be disturbed unless they—or one of the more likable of the family pets—

are on fire.

EATING YOUR WAY TO 50,000 WORDS

If I had to describe my motivational strategy for drafting a novel in one month, it would be this: treat-orama. Writing a novel is a creative exercise, sure, but it’s also a remarkably convenient opportunity to shower yourself with self-love, goodies, and other pampering items you’ve gone far too long without having in your life. Allowing yourself loads of restaurant meals, sugary treats, and exotic beverages is the best way to keep your spirits high during the exhausting mental acrobatic routines you’ll be Pulling off next month as you write.

TAKEAWAY FOOD FROM LOCAL RESTAURANTS

Month-long novel writing is like running a marathon: You need to make sure you have the right fuel available at all times, preferably handed to you by strangers as you run past them. Thankfully, there are dozens of restaurants in your area that will serve as your nutritional support staff, all for less than $8

per entree.

Avail yourself of the hospitality of these culinary good Samaritans during your noveling month. Remember: You have not been put on this Earth to cook meals for yourself and write a novel. Delegate the kitchen work as often as possible, and everyone will be the happier for it.

MASS MEALS

If you find the takeout meals are starting to drive you into debt, hit the grocery stores and stock up on the fixin’s for Mass Meals. These are the easy-to-prepare-in-vast-quantities entrees that you know and love from institutional cafeterias and buffet lines. Consider an acre-sized pan of lasagna, a two-ton casserole, or a vat of tuna salad. Potatoes can be baked by the dozen, then refrigerated until you’re ready to top them with cheese and veggies.