The Powers That Were

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So the much-anticipated 24-Hour Art Marathon, featuring my 16-Hour Interactive Novel, is over and done. What a blast, from beginning to end!

Jennifer and I arrived at 8 p.m. on Saturday night and set up shop — laptop, printer, and buckets for people to drop suggestions in at my end of the table, art supplies and paper at Jennifer’s end. As I got busy launching the first chapter (which I had pretty much roughed out in my head), Jennifer explained the project to everyone who passed by and got them involved in creating character ideas, plot twists, and illustrations for as-yet-unwritten scenes. We had a steady stream of people at the table all night — friends like Sherry and ALL the Strident Women in full force, Writer’s Guild members, complete artistic strangers, and a few of my students and former students like the stalwart Vince and Lauren who stayed all night to keep me company, even when Jennifer went home to catch a little sleep. People brought me snacks, coffee, and a constant supply of ideas to keep me going.

The writing itself was not only a fun challenge but also a great writing exercise and a real learning experience for me as a writer. I started with only the vaguest sense of where the plot was headed, and as I pulled people’s suggestions from the ice-cream buckets, I had to stretch to accomodate juggling unicyclists, Scottish castles, an emergency tracheotomy and the 9/11 terrorist attacks (to mention just a few of the ideas people threw at me). But I also found that the plot and character ideas, even some of the most bizarre, actually gave direction and kept me thinking up creative ways to move the story forward.

In the end, I produced 26,000 words — more a novella than a novel, but it was about 100 manuscript pages and it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, which I was aiming for. I had some great laughs and actually learned a few important lessons about writing, which I will share sometime when I am less tired. I veered into postmodernism and dragged my character right into the art studio to confront me, the author — oh, and I got interviewed on the radio and read a piece of the story on-air. You can hear that clip here, recorded and preserved by the Lovely Tina.

I typed my last words at about 10:00 a.m., meaning that the whole production actually took about 14 hours. We are going to produce a few printed copies of the final book (though the lovely full-colour illustrations by Jennifer and a variety of other artists will be reduced to black-and-white) and make them available for the cost of printing to anyone interested, so let me know if you’d like one and I’ll keep you posted. And if you ever get the chance to write a novel in under 24 hours, I’d say go for it!

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