WRITING | A version of “How I wrote a novel in three days” was published in the Vancouver Sun, September, 2004. Jump down below the photographed article for a 2018 update and some deep thoughts.

FICTION-MAKING | Despite what you may think, writing a novel in three days isn’t impossible.

It takes determination, discipline, and a single-mindedness not many people possess, but it can be done. Thanks to the motivation provided by the 3-Day Novel Contest – a Labour Day rite of passage, created in Canada – hundreds of people do it every year.

And if they can do it so, can I. Or, so I thought.

At 24, I know I have a kind of youthful cockiness.

Yet I’m well aware that the slide from confidence into conceit is a short one.

That said, my positive attitude has often worked to my advantage. I’m pretty lucky not to be shackled with the crippling self-doubt that plagues so many women my age.

What’s that expression – the bigger they are, the harder they fall? Well, because I have a rather fat head, I fell face-first.

Last weekend, I entered the contest and spent three torment-filled days attempting to complete a novel and – foolishly, naively, given the insane nature of the task – I never thought I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t expect to win.

Quality was far from my primary concern. I just wanted to finish. To prove I could.

When I began writing Friday night – 12:01 a.m., Saturday, to be exact – I was blissfully calm. I had a topic in mind. My novel would be one of those quintessentially female stories where nothing really happens, but the heroine works through some crisis or other via the day-to-day virtue of housework and friends. (Ick. I know.)

With this in mind, I typed everything that came into my head. Order didn’t matter, connections didn’t matter. It was a venture of baby steps, each tiny paragraph an accomplishment.

I was Hurricane.

A well-oiled machine. I was Anne Lamott on speed. But then I got hungry. Then thirsty, then tired, then bored.

By Saturday night, every time I took a break, I considered giving up. I couldn’t remember why I’d started in the first place. And there was that What Not To Wear marathon on TLC to watch. I felt bogged down by the process. By not being able to relax, clean my room, or take a bath.

The problem wasn’t that the writing was going badly, but that the volume of writing I had to produce was so daunting. I forced myself to shut my drapes and soldier on. I stopped pretending to be hungry.

My Monday morning, the end of was in sight and I was exhausted. My fingers ached, my eyes burned and I had a serious burning in my stomach – gut rot, I think it’s called – from all the caffeine.

And then I got called in to work.

Things happen.

The sad truth is, most writers – even the best, and the most prolific – don’t make a living at it. Everyone has other responsibilities: jobs, kids, homes, whatever.

Thanks to a silly mistake on my part, I had to work. And so, when the Monday-night deadline rolled around, I found myself unfinished and defeated. I had 90-some pages of manuscript, no ending, and hours of organization and spell-check ahead of me.

So if you want to know how I wrote a novel in three days, all I can say it … I didn’t.

At three o’clock in the morning, I was stomping my feet and pounding my pillow with cries of “No fair!”

But life goes on. Momentarily devastated and properly humbled by my 3-Day Novel Contest experience, I still think it was a good one.

After all, no one said it would be easy. If I ever fully recover, I might even do it again.

Published September, 2004 in The Vancouver Sun.

2018: This is a fascinating old-read on a personal level at least.

I had forgotten the peppy, you-win-some-you-lose-some attitude I’d been forced to bring to the story, following what I actually recall as an extremely difficult and emotionally upsetting event.

A couple of facts: There was so “silly mistake on my part” that caused me to have to go into work. I was called into work because management at the paper where I worked was awful. Some other asshole made the “silly error” (read: ignored me when I booked the time off) and because I was a young person, and a junior person, and it was a holiday weekend, and because I was terrified of making anyone at the paper angry since my job was really no more than a precarious contract with no benefits (repeatedly renewed, but still), when they called me and said I was on the schedule, despite having deliberately booked the time off, I had to go.

They understood I was upset.

After 48 hours with no sleep, working on this stupid novel contest, which I was only doing because I’d been assigned this story, which, for the record, I was not being paid to write and which was on top of the workload of my actual job, as all my stories were, I wasn’t hiding my frustration very well.

The Managing Editor at the time – a man named Kirk – must have been told and called me into his office to tell me, not in so many words, to suck it the fuck up. I don’t remember much of the conversation. He’d never so much as spoken to me before. Embarrassment at the thought of public crying was the only thing really keeping me together. I remember that his general tact was to tell me not to worry about it and that I didn’t really have anything to be upset about (so gaslighty, but no one was using that term back then), and that he suggested that I just kill all the characters in a plane crash or something. Very helpful.

As written, I did not finish the manuscript for the contest. And in this article, I made a joke out of the whole thing.

And not for nothing, but I just want to point out one more time that pretty much all of the writing I did for the Vancouver Sun in 2004 was unpaid. By this point, I think I’d published more than 20 pieces, all of them completed for free. My actual newsroom job was paid, sure, and it was boring and repetitive, but time-consuming. I thought I was just “paying my dues” or building my portfolio, that this is what everyone had to do, that unionized employees were lazy whiners, etc. etc. I didn’t see at the time how fucked up it is to expect and capitalize on unpaid labour from young people, and I feel extremely guilty about how I (and other dumb kids like me), helped evil corporate management undermine the labour efforts of other (supposedly-better-protected) staff.

Sigh.

Another thing that strikes me about this piece is how hard I’m working to say two things: 1) That I know I’m young, but that 2) I’m self-deprecating, so please don’t hate me. This whole persona I’m crafting – as an arrogant, self-aggrandizing, but self-aware baby – is bizarre when I look back and think about what I was actually like.

I have never once in my life been overconfident.

Rather, I am only every cautiously optimistic, and am regularly plagued by relentless self-doubt and anxiety about my worth. I have the self-esteem of your average mole. At the same time, I knew how I looked and how my work looked.

Concussion and a cracked rib = happy 24th birthday to me!

I was writing regularly for the newspaper at 24. I was reviewing concerts and getting free tickets and books, and my name was in the paper nearly every week.

Writing professionally has a strange cache to it.

I believed then, and believe even more so now, that it’s actually something of a nightmare as a career. It’s awful. Truly. Soul-sucking and mind-numbing. But people persist in seeing it as a “cool job”. An easy job. A job that makes you lucky and that you should be deeply grateful to have. And everybody seems to think they can be a writer. They don’t see the work part of the work. They don’t know that nobody really gives a shit about the person who wrote the piece (unless we’ve made a mistake … then suddenly they care). So I was afraid of looking smug. I didn’t want anyone to dislike me. And I could see how people were starting to see my portfolio and immediately assume me a spoiled little shit. So I was trying to beat them to it, I guess, with pieces like this one.

I had already stopped telling people I worked at the newspaper, let alone that I was actually writing for it.

It was a revelation that seemed to make others either angry or jealous. If I had to reveal where I worked, I would vaguely say something that made people think I had an administrative position. It seemed to make others more comfortable if they thought I was a receptionist. I was volunteering in my spare time as a Brownie leader and parents would find out where I worked and they (the men in particular) would be really irritated if they thought I was a writer. Hostile. When they believed me – with my brown skin, and long hair, and general youthful girlishness – to be a receptionist, they were a lot nicer. It’s fucked up, but I think the world is still this way.

2004 was a strange time for me.

As mentioned in past updates, I was in a bad relationship, and extremely isolated by that relationship because I didn’t want anyone to know how bad it was. I was lonely and embarrassed and working very hard at multiple jobs, but only being paid for one.

During the summer, I’d sustained a fairly serious injury (a concussion and a cracked rib) while playing softball, which I laughed off and barely told anyone about. I didn’t even tell my boyfriend, with whom I was living, that I’d been to the doctor to confirm either injury. (Who doesn’t tell the person they live with that they’re concussed? I mean, what on earth?)

That injury had happened in a really irritating way. Darrell and I were playing softball with some friends of his from work (lawyers, generally, mostly men) and I was playing Centre Field and had called “mine” on a fly ball coming my way. Another fielder, being a man, had completely ignored my call (again, I was playing centre field, again, I’d fucking called it) and he basically ran me over. The idiot ran right the fuck into me, on my ball, that I’d called, and he was a big dude, and I was a small, secretly anorexic woman, and I of course went down hard while he stayed up like a fucking tree. And then, for all of the same reasons detailed above, I felt I had to laugh it off like it was nothing.

A bruise bloomed across my chest that looked like a spreading plague.

The cracked rib made it hard to breathe. I was dizzy for months, literally, as a result of the concussion. And I pretended, both at work and at home, that this was all fine, and that if I ever wasn’t quite fine, it was still fine because it was all my own fault. Everything was my own stupid fault. (Reader, it was most assuredly NOT my fault.) I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to look back on this now. None of this was my fault, but there were all kinds of societal and social pressures at work here. So much internalized misogyny. And none of that was my fault either.