Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Could you write a novel in three days? Would you want to? And what sort of novel might emerge from that literary lock-in?
The 3-Day Novel Contest is a venerable beast of a challenge. A 45 year old standing rebuke to the notion that a novel must take years and years out of life to be any good. The contest runs each September over Labor Day weekend in the US and Canada and has rules that rely on the honesty of contestants over what does and does not happen in that time. It says ‘novel’ in the name, though in reality no one will be physically able to produce more than around 150 pages in three days, so the discipline of brevity is everything.
But why do it? Like many people, I tend to work on several stories at once. Which means progress across those projects can be slow. The 3-Day is a way of prioritising one thing. Taking uninterrupted time to make substantial headway on a story. At the end of the long weekend, what you have in front of you won’t be polished and it won’t be perfect. But it will be a good chunk of something that you can go on to build and shape.
I edit as I write. I scrutinise words and wade deep into the thesaurus. The contest cuts through all of that. You have to keep moving forward. You don’t have the luxury to spend an hour weighing up this or that phrasing. It’s a means to set aside your established ways of working, to prioritise momentum over prevarication. And it keeps research to necessary dimensions, with no time to follow link after link into rabbit holes of knowledge.
The organisers provide detailed rules and a survival guide, which you really should read before you pay your registration fee. It’s not a challenge everyone would want to take and I wouldn’t recommend doing it if there are other things in life that, for whatever good reason, may distract you.
It’s a good idea to know ahead of time the story you want to tell. Some preparatory work is permitted under the rules, as long as it doesn’t tip over into actual writing. For Attack of the Lonely Hearts I had a title, a central dynamic (adorable klutzy woman pursues aloof elegant man), a narrative hook in the shape of comedic legend John Candy and a broad idea of the scenes the characters would play through. Having that was vital, to check my progress against the clock, because you need some idea of where your story will have got to at, say, the end of each six hours.
The temptation may be to brew some strong coffee and give sleep a miss for the weekend. But my inner project manager wouldn’t allow anything so unstructured. Instead, I set work hours for each of the three days and, broadly, stuck to that. I allowed 14 hours on each of the first two days, with meal breaks at regular times and set a hard stop of 6pm on day three. That was necessary, to allow time for wallowing in the pleasure of having finished.
There were times when I slowed down and doubted the whole thing was worth it. But I guess it’s like those people who go running in mountains and forests. The challenge is ultimately against yourself, it’s not a race with anyone else – you don’t have to submit your manuscript, you don’t have to complete it. There’s a tremendous power to be had in purely voluntary activity.
Which I guess is why the 3-Day survival guide emphasises that the most important attitude to have is humility. This challenge is not an aggressive engagement with the novel form. It’s a supplication to the power of writing. A reminder that we are the channel through which the story flows and it’s the story that matters. Done in the right spirit, for the right reasons, it’s probably the best way to spend a weekend without having to put on clean clothes.
Anthony Burgess, who was a sly old fox, once claimed, wholly mischievously, that he wrote A Clockwork Orange in three weeks for the money. I can’t claim to have Burgess’s linguistic virtuosity or critical depth. But I wrote Attack of the Lonely Hearts in three days and the value of that experience continues to shape my work.
(c) Mark Wagstaff
Winner of the 39th annual 3-Day Novel Contest Attack of the Lonely Hearts is available here from Anvil Press.
On the Level by Mark Wagstaff is published by Cinnamon Press and is available here.
More about Mark’s work at www.markwagstaff.com
About On The Level:
Tough teen Riz Montgomery plays high stakes roulette as London burns. With bugs in her skin and noise in her head, Riz is real and the rest are fake. What matters to her: Mark Rothko’s art. So despite the horror of family time, it’s a fine thing that a major Rothko show coincides with the global conference where her so-called Dad is such a big wheel. Holed up with VIPs at a heavily guarded hotel, Riz collides with a sharp-dressed assassin she calls The Man. As she plunges into a world of covert deals and power plays, Riz is befriended and betrayed by Russian and Syrian agents. And emotionally bruised by the leader of a violent anti-capitalist group in town to protest the conference. Told in Riz’s breathless, insistent voice, the edgy friendship between the isolated teen and the travelling killer drives a thrill-ride through riot-torn London.
Order your copy online here.
