Three Day

I'm writing this at 6:00 in the morning, from bed, and I haven't even been to sleep yet. I've always had trouble sleeping, but my inner clock is messed up from the last few days of my life, which have been an amazing enough experience that I thought I'd update my essentially inactive blog.


A friend of mine told me about this crazy contest where you have 72 hours to write a novel. You can visit the website here: www.3daynovel.com (it'll give you more information about the rules, which I won't really get into.) the main idea is this: start a novel at midnight on Saturday, finish it by 11:59 Monday night. The judges pick a winner and it gets published.

Somehow I let this girl I hardly know talk me into entering.

It was an amazing experience. I wasn't really sure what to expect but I can tell you this: I know how I'm spending my Labor Day weekend from now on.

You're allowed to prepare an outline. After several days of going back and forth about a new idea, I finally caved in to writing a story that has been in my head since 2007. I began at exactly midnight, and finished sometime late Monday afternoon, with several hours left to edit.

I worked crazy hours, I made significant plot changes, I cried a little. But I learned a lot about writing and quite a bit about my capabilities as a writer. If I put my mind to it, I can totally write a novel in three days. I felt like Jack Kerouac.

Ultimately, I produced a story that I'm really proud of. I would like to think it keeps readers on the edge of their seats and that the plot twist is hard to see coming. It's a draft, you know, but it's the first real story of any substantial length that I've ever finished. There is something in that thought - that I finally brought those characters to life - that made the whole weekend worthwhile.

I don't expect my story to win the contest and get published - but I feel like it could. I don't know how many entries they get every year, I don't know the standards they use to pick the winners. But I feel like I wrote something worth reading, something worth sharing.

In a month I'll allow myself to pick it up again, to read it, edit, revise. I'm sure I'll find things to change. And hopefully I will find places to expand, because outside the world of this contest, it would make a very short novel indeed. But I wrote the first draft in three days, and it was an experience I will never forget.