We Made It To The Russian Brothel!

As an English Literature student, and long time lover of all writing extended, whether critical or creative, I am no stranger to rough calluses along my fingers, aching wrists, and ink smeared hands. Or words. A blank page staring me in the face and waiting to be filled to the brim with blotted script cannot scare me.

So late last year when I heard of NaNoWriMo – or National Novel Writing Month – I thought bring it on. NaNoWriMo is a month in which contestants must write fifty thousand words of a novel. If you succeed, you win, simple as that! And the prospect of fifty thousand words in the month of November was not daunting, but brilliant; it allowed you to abandon all pressures of quality, and instead just gets you to write the novel – that idea you’ve had in your head all of this time – rewriting can wait for December, if you even want to (Believe me when I say I really didn’t). So it didn’t matter how much it sucked, because everyone else’s sucks too.

And my, did it suck. My ‘novel’ was terrible, a true disgrace to the authors that had practically interned me over the years of reading. The sentence structure was repetitive, my lead character, Venus, pathetic, and the whole progression slow.

That’s the thing with NaNo: You really want to win it. Not a day went by where I didn’t think about hitting that 50K. So I word padded. A lot. True, Venus is an introvert, but she often made Sherlock Holmes look like a child in the park saying ‘Look, mummy, a doggy!’ with the extent of her descriptions. Because of this it took about five thousand words for her to see anyone, go or be anywhere, or do anything, new. It was slow, painstakingly so.

But there was something there.

Maybe, after my novel endeavour (see what I did there? Oh shut up), I still retained my ‘journalistic tendancies’, and I was inconceivably far from finished, but I had something to work with.

Among the dense lump of nothing words and no hyphens, the jumbled mess of inarticulately mused philosophy that was the bulk of my ‘novel’, was something.

It was not solid suck. It was mostly suck, granted, but not entirely so. At its core lay a very little something that most people miss (But I had been staring at the thing for a whole month, rather intently, I might add, and so spotted it, only briefly, out of the corner of my eye). Something that, in the right light, if you squint and cock your head to one side while in an extremely optimistic mood might just be…not suck. Just maybe.

So I stuck at it. I took my just over fifty thousand words and ran with it; it was something I really wanted. In the words of Chris Baty (Google him): The world needs your novel. I needed mine.

Sadly, with the impending threat of exam time, and mocks, and future planning, while holding down a job and five AS Levels, the novel took a back burner. NaNo and November were over. My motivation was gone.

Enter: CAMP NANOWRIMO!

It was perfect – the exact same concept, only at a much better time of the year…and Camp themed! You got ‘cabin buddies’ and everything!

Here was my chance: I grabbed my novel, I grabbed my pen. In the month of June I became a writing machine once more, powered by caffeine and the glorious prospect of a finished novel. I knew what I had done wrong in November, and I could fix it this time.

It was time to rewrite.

I know, right?

I still didn’t finish the novel though.

But, undoubtedly, I am happier with my fifty thousand this time; they go in a better direction at a faster pace. By six thousand Venus had got to the place and met the girl she previously met at forty in November. That catastrophic group therapy session that seemed a distant hope hovering on the blurred horizon of the plot point scattered future? Got there by thirty. All of the situations I had dreamed of came through, and all of the context dependent one liners that carried the comedic weight of the entire novel got used. I even found myself having to come up with new characters and lines to fill the empty space of unplanned novel I had written myself into. The vague plot line hovered, hopeful, around me. Space that had previously been merely ‘something ___________ happens’ needed filling. For example, Jake. Jake is a guy Venus meets at her first party, who is somewhat ‘intoxicated’ and missing his eyebrows. No one knows how he lost them, and every time you ask him how he gives you a different story. If he is ‘intoxicated’ it will, without fail, contain alligators. Jake is the first sign Venus has that ‘all that glitters is not gold’, and the world she has entered is not as glorious as the Skins trailer would have us believe. Before Jake ‘Something weird happens’ was all I knew.

Of course, Jake had to get his intoxicating materials from somewhere, and they were middle-manned to the party via Venus’ ‘grotesquely interesting’ new friend with a VW Campervan from – you guessed it – a Russian brothel.

Admittedly, I assigned a great deal of significance to the Russian brothel; after failing to do so in November, I wanted to get there more than my characters did. It was my last planned out detail, the last cliff I had to jump off into the oblivion of improvised writing. I figured if I could get there it would all start. All of the adventures, and the mess, the real story, would follow.

And they got there, I got there. We made it to the Russian brothel. Don’t worry; it was all very tame. Venus just sat and spoke to the non-English speaking old Russian prostitute until they had what they came for. I can’t repeat what the prostitute said though. If you want to know that you’ll have to buy the book.

Then I procrastinated for a few days, because, hey, I just wrote a novel. Then I got back into the writing, not intensely, but with definite enjoyment, because my wrists were tired from writing a novel by hand.

The novel may not be finished, or at all good, even after the rewrite. It is improving though, and I have a further fifty thousand words that were just thoughts at the start of the month. I learnt a lot about time management, my optimum conditions for working, my caffeine limits, how to avoid what I love becoming a chore, and I really did – this sounds cheesy, but excuse me; I just wrote a novel I have no words left – have fun.

Oh, yeah, and I wrote a freaking novel.

Boom.

So, Camp NaNoWriMo returns again in August, and so I implore you all to sign up and, you know, write words! Write the novel the world needs! Write the novel you need! Write the novel whoever is sitting next to you needs! Just write! Because it’s amazing. Get to your Russian brothel; I’ll see you on the shelf.

[Camp NaNoWriMo can be found at http://www.campnanowrimo.org/ . If you don’t want to compete in August, start your own Horribly Local Novel Writing Month (HoLoNoWriMo) with your own dates, and let me know how you get on.]