I Wrote A Book in One Weekend
Quarantine has been...endless.
After months of remote classes, online finals, and state-wide shutdowns, I found myself feeling equal parts restless and exhausted. It’s a strange paradox to sit in, but one I’m sure others have become familiar with. The worst part of it is that I felt largely unable to write. Between the monotony of self-isolation and the never-ending dystopian news cycle, I couldn’t find any energy to spare when I sat down in front of a blank page. I’d open up Microsoft and sit there. The cursor would blink at me. I’d blink back. I’d write a sentence, then delete it; try another one, delete that, too. Force myself to spit out a paragraph or two before finally admitting defeat.
I had other things that helped keep my mental health in check. I kept as much of a routine as I could: morning walks and yoga practices, quarantine cleaning, that sort of thing. But the fact that I found myself repeatedly, relentlessly unable to write was getting to me.
It’ll get better after finals, I told myself in May. It didn’t.
It’ll get better after summer classes, I said in June. It didn’t.
It’ll write after these finals, I swore in July. I turned in the exams. Opened a Word document. The cursor blinked up at me, waiting. If it could, I’m sure it would have whistled the Jeopardy! tune as it waited, and waited, and waited.
It was around this point that I decided I’d had enough.
I’m a naturally competitive person, so it only seemed right to give myself a challenge: I was going to write a book — a whole book — top to bottom, start to finish — in one weekend, just to prove that I could. I hadn’t finished a project since my last sale back in February, and I was determined to put a stop to my own dry spell once and for all. I’ve participated in enough NaNoWriMo events to know that I could finish a book in a month, and I’ve seen people talk about finishing their novels in a week, or even three days. If they could do it, so could I.
THE RULES — because I need structure, or else I will die.
The “book” would be a first draft of something brand new.
I would not edit a single sentence. Backspacing was off-limits.
It didn’t have to be pretty; messes are just sandboxes to build castles out of later. I could write as many author’s notes as I wanted, jump around the timeline, rewrite scenes three times if I didn’t know how they were supposed to go. It just had be written.
THE PREP — aka: re-reading Anne Lamott, and telling loved ones I’d lost my mind.
This was something of a spur-of-the-moment project, so I didn’t do a whole lot of preparing. I got the idea for the story while walking my dog on a Monday morning. By Wednesday, I decided I was going to commit to writing it. On Thursday, I decided that a first draft could be finished over the coming weekend.
The bulk of my prep work included:
Downloading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and listening to the chapter on shitty first drafts while folding laundry.
Telling people about my seemingly-ridiculous self-imposed deadline, including:
my parents, who I’ve been staying with since March and who deserved to know why I wouldn’t be looking up from my laptop for hours at a time and why I’d be more spaced out than usual during dinner, and
my friends, who I’ve been going on weekly walks with because that’s about all the “getting out” one can do these days and who are notorious for remembering what we talked about last week and would therefore hold me accountable by asking about my weekend writing marathon.
I also put out a Tweet speaking this book into existence and declaring that I would be back when the first draft was finished, because writing a whole book in one weekend means dropping off the face of earth (at least as far as the internet is concerned), and I wanted to be able to proudly announce the completion of my book when all was said and done.
The last of the prep work included making a playlist to write to, making a Pinterest storyboard, and scribbling out some vague ideas about the story’s general trajectory.
THE WRITING — during which I thought about nothing but my story for three days straight.
DAY ONE: Call it cheating if you want, but I started work on what has since become known as UNTITLED HAUNTED COTTAGE-CORE PROJECT on Friday, July 17th. Long weekends exist, and- for personal reasons -that particular date is a somber affair in our household anyway. I knew I wasn’t going to feel like doing much else, and I was excited to dive into this particular story. I watched Howl’s Moving Castle, Little Women, Anne With an E, and Stranger Things and dumped as many words onto the page as I could.
I wound up getting through most of the exposition, pinning down the characters, and introducing the eerie feeling I’d wanted to permeate the novel with. By the end of the day, I had about 5,000 words of randomly selected scenes and lengthy author’s notes finished.
DAY TWO: On Saturday, I wrote a second potential introductory scene, because there were a few lines of dialogue nagging me all night long and I knew I had to get them out of my system. I also wrote the first of three potential endings on this day, and started toying with ways that I could mesh them all into one.
I watched more Anne With an E, and another episode of Stranger Things. I listened to a lot of music. I wrote outside, because sometimes a change of scenery is what you really need to get the juices flowing. I wrote a lot of author’s notes. I wondered if I was perhaps a little bit insane. I pushed that thought aside and pounded out a few thousand more words.
DAY THREE: My parents kept asking how the book was coming. I kept murmuring answers without looking up from the computer. My wrists hurt a little bit. Maybe I should take a break? I watched more Anne With an E, laptop close at hand. I listened to some Danny Elfman. I thought about how to transition between acts two and three while pretending to be engaged in dinner conversation.
By 8pm on July 19th, I was finished. I tweeted. I ran a victory lap around the backyard. I told my parents, who had so kindly dealt with my casual disassociation all weekend as I lived in the world of my story, hardly paying attention to the real-world conversations they’d had around me for the last three days. I had a glass of wine.
I’m still working on that story. As I told Twitter, it is extraordinarily messy, and absolutely unfit for human eyes. I think the majority of it only makes sense to me right now, but I’ve already revisited Anne Lamott’s book, and she says that that’s okay. And I say so, too, because on July 17th I didn’t have a book, and I hadn’t written anything substantial in months, and three days later I had the draft of something that I think is pretty special. Maybe I’ll even spend another weekend hammering out the details in the currently unstarted second draft.
Was this challenge a little crazy? Probably. But it was worth it. It was so, so worth it.
In three days’ time, I proved to myself that I could write even when writing felt impossible. In three days, I wrote more than I’d written in three whole months. In one long weekend I made a book appear out of thin air. I gave myself the confidence to keep fighting for this thing that I’ve always wanted; I introduced myself to characters who quickly came integral parts of my life, and I told a story that had been scratching inside of me, desperate to get out. It felt a lot like showing my middle finger to the nightmare that’s been 2020. This year has been heartbreaking, and terrifying, and frustrating, and left me feeling so defeated, and I turned that around in the span of three short days.
Take that, 2020.
Now on to Draft Two.