A Novel Idea

Ok, so every year I partake in a minor internet contest known as NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month to the unaware. I tried explaining the concept to my friend at work yesterday and he couldn't grasp why I did it. 'Do you get a prize?' I told him you received a glowing sense of achievement, 'Yeah but what do you get?' Well actually you get a first draft of a... half novel. And the chance to see where the caverns of your mind and your creative instincts can take you.
'And what is it that you do again?'
'You write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, through November.'
'And you get nothing for it?'
...
'Well it's not like I can do Movember!'
Note to self, you're not funny. Plus if I could grow an impressive moustache things would be very different for me, I'm sure.

To be fair over the years I have lost all of my novels that I've written due to my failure to back anything up, and because I hated a good few of them after reading them back. So in essence the idea of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel, writing 1,667 words a day, and produce something, anything, and just to see what you can come up with. There's also the camaraderie, but I rarely convince anyone to do it with me. This year my boyfriend is going to try, he gave it a go the other year and only managed 1,000 words before calling his work a masterpiece and giving up. This time he seems quite up for it, plus having someone to bounce words off might really help, I always get stuck using a thesaurus in the latter days because, my words aren't interesting enough and I keep repeating myself.

It's usually at this point in the years I start consolidating what ideas I have. I don't normally tell people my ideas, I keep them all stored in my head, mainly through the intense fear if I describe them to people or try and put them into words they'll immediately disintegrate, or worse I'll realise, or someone else will blithely point out, that's a stupid idea. All of my novels have been stupid ideas. But now for my own personal discovery, and just to see if I can glean some bits from previous attempts, I'm going to just write down the past 5 novel attempts I have made. Oh ho! This is going to be way more difficult than I anticipated. I rarely go into my novels with particularly well thought out ideas...

Now to trawl the internet and find what remnants I can of my previous attempts and give a run down. I know I posted snippets somewhere just to show off...

NaNoWriMo 2006: FAIL
The Rat's Arse

My first attempt at a novel, I was 16, couldn't have been more chuffed with the title. Actually I'm seriously considering reusing that... Not for this year but in the future, might be my memoir's inevitable title. So the story is a girl, her parents died in a freak accident and she gathered up all the money she had and ran away. She went to the great metropolis, well London, and ended up sleeping rough until she found a pub called The Rat's Arse (big surprise!) A bartender takes pity on her, puts her up and takes care of her. They fall in love, awwww - the end! Quick note, I fail at romance, Unfortunately her shiny new lover has money issues with the local mafia or nefarious nare do well folks of the city and his debts become too much. He kills himself and makes it look like the girl did it in a struggle. I didn't quite get the fine tuned points of that down... Anyway, that mafia think it's her, and they chase her, so off she runs again. I left her running, I didn't finish it due to loss of USB and swift loss of mind after that. Plus I found other things to do, that was the year I started drinking.

NaNoWrimo 2007: WINNER
Untitled.

Kind of like a spiritual extension of my previous tale, there is more running. Well sorta, less running more of that mafia thing. So there was a girl who fell in love, awww, and her boyfriend is killed by the mafia, but then she is recruited because he was a bounty hunter and they force her to take on his mantle until they are satisfied, or I think they tortured her to replace him because they saw something in her... But basically if she doesn't  do as she's told she is tortured. Well I'd been having nightmares around that point about torture. I think I'd watched Saw... But from what I recall I did write a lot of bizarre murder/torture scenes, and there was a guy called Norman in it! I peeked at my online diary during that month, boy things were bizarre back then for me. Parents were all over the place, I was invited to a massive house party but instead took the opportunity to go to see American Gangster, I stayed out all night on the beach because I didn't want to go home and I wore a red wig all weekend and made my friends wear it. Then I went home and wrote a novel about... Well frankly disturbing stuff, so first success! I didn't finish it though, I just stopped writing when I got to 50,000 and never looked at it again.

NaNoWriMo 2008: WINNER
Green Eyes (Working Title)

So I was going through a serious Chuck Palahniuk phase this point, I also figured literature needed more swearing in it, I was 18 and trying to be daring. This was also the first time I'd written about a male protagonist. Unfortunately he has... Issues. He used to get dressed up as a girl by his extremely sexually charged aunt, who he had complicated feelings for. There are a lot of jokes he was overly feminine. I killed off his Dad mercilessly in the first couple thousand words and then proceeded to make his life living hell. He bases a lot of his sexual fantasies around his aunt, she was a fun character, alabaster skin, flame red hair, a wisp of a woman, her clothes weighed her down, and she wore excessive amounts of eyeliner around her green eyes, she used to wear lots of beads and would rattle as she walked in a permanent delirious haze - Florence Welch was somewhat inspiration, before she became very famous. So main guy meets a girl who looks like her and shags her, gets drunk and lost and basically goes on a massive bender and loses his mind, his Dad had just died after all. The girl he meets then breaks into his house a few days later and begins to squat there, she keeps herself entertained by observing his drunken state of distress with humour and sleeps with him whenever he stumbles home drunk from his dad's funeral, his depressing office job (staff members were disappearing inexplicably there) etc. She reappears sporadically through the years never staying for longer than a few days, days he spends these visits boffing her and making awkward comparisons, she remains a beautiful mystery to him and refuses to tell him about herself. He starts to blur some lines of reality and starts to think she's his aunt mainly because she's a beautifully mysterious blank canvas, that his bosses are trying to kill him, that his mother was trying to steal his money, that poor perpetually drunk and confused boy. Oh yeah, it ended badly. And considering it was the second story I wrote I was pleased to finish it definitively, if in a very grim manner.


NaNoWriMo 2009: FAIL
Man in a Field (I'm just calling it that for arguments sake, not actual title.)

Pretty much a non attempt... Wrote about 500 words and couldn't think of anything else. It started in a field, there was a man looking for his car keys. I thought it would be kind of Sherlock/mystery/abstract/poetic. Actually it was shit. Ultimate fail.

NaNoWriMo 2010: NON STARTER
I was beyond depressed and trying to finish my degree/start my dissertation, worst time to do a novel so I didn't even attempt it then. Plus there was a few family problems taking place. Would have been some good inspiration but yeah, last thing on my mind.

NaNoWriMo 2011: WINNER
Glass Eyes

My most recent addition and one of my bigger concepts. Well I say that, it's actually quite a constricting concept, I was working hard to make it more novel like. The idea was that the whole tale took place from the POV of the main character's doll. The main character is of course a girl, with a really ugly doll. More than I care to say of this idea was taken from real life. In fact a lot of the core idea was directly lifted from personal experience. Specifically the part where as the girl grew up, her mother became more attached to the doll and would sit with it and mourn her daughter growing up. Unfortunately I wasn't very sure how to work with the voice of the doll. My first non-human point of view was very confusing. I wanted the doll to have an alien quality to it, I wanted it to be an amusing if cynical view, it started like that then it just got out and out pessimistic. By the last stretch I was bored by the idea, I killed off the brother, the parents argued and threatened to divorce time and time again, I had the girl lose her virginity to some arsehole. The scene was a funny one; the girl pushes the doll surreptitiously off the bed as the boy lays her down and it then spends the event with it's face on the floor under the bed. I had the neighbours dog steal the doll and bury it in the garden, then the mum put it in the washing machine. All much fun to write but I felt uncertain how to finish it, it was just watching the family grow up and I found myself uncertain what I was trying to convey apart from the banalities of life from an odd perspective. Let's just say my creative juices ran dry. I ended the tale on a low note, the doll just wanted to put in a box and allowed to be left in peace, but in the end the mother kept it at her side as her husband walked out on her, she buried her son and her daughter left for university. So no one was happy; apart from the daughter. I gave it a proper end though so I was pleased about that. I was also pleased when it was over.


So as well as listing my previous attempts I might as well make a list of books I was intending to read before setting off on my own personal novel attempt. My first port of call was Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, it being one of my favourite books, I'll probably follow that up with Diary as they are joint the best things I believe he has written. Plus I have a vague idea about what I intend to write about and Diary will be a good place to start with that. Then I was thinking of reading The Shining and Anna Karenina. A good friend is also greatly in love The Great Gatsby, as it is a well known excellent book I hope to read that. I've also been recommended To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Another one I was hoping to read was Storm of Swords, by far the best book in Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Any excuse to read that again... Plus they are filming series 3. Well... I don't think I have enough hours in the day to read all of them before November. Plus before I should stop before I bore anyone who stumbles across this blog to tears with more of my rambling.