3-Day Novelist Gone Wild! An interview with Don Britt by Jennifer Thompson
Completing twenty-four novels in one lifetime is much more than most writers even dream of accomplishing, never mind twenty-four in one year.
But that is the goal of one very determined Don Britt, part-time music teacher and self-professed “C.S Lewis Christian” preacher from Oxbow, Saskatoon, a city near Saskatchewan made famous by The Guess Who. Britt’s journey is documented in a play-by-play on his website, Twenty Four Novels One Year, where you can view his writing marathon in real-time lags.
Britt has already accomplished what most writers who sit alone on their piles of rejection slips rarely manage to do: climb up out of the abyss and get noticed. Garnering press from The National Post and other observers, Britt had already attracted the attention of many and is hoping something great is going to come of his mission. We’re all rooting for him.
As the clock ticks toward his November 5th deadline, I grabbed a bit of his precious time to discuss why the writing life can be so bloody depressing, along with a bit of political sparring and the sometimes surprising creative lust that harsh deadlines and restrictions can drive.
Don Britt, 3-day novelist gone wild!
Jennifer Thompson: Bukowski said that you can only call yourself a writer if you write. You are proving that surly old bastard right. Is there a difference between someone who just writes and a writer?
Don Britt: What matters most is the achievement of your personal goals. My goal is to write full-time. It’s my life’s only ambition, and I would be much better off without it. Really, I’m miserable a lot of the time. During one of my 3-day novels I told my best friend, “Death is preferable to chasing a dream.” The saddest part is that I meant it. People have assured me that my goal is not attainable. Loved ones have told me that I’m wasting my life, sometimes with tears in their eyes. The truth is, they might be right. But I’m not going to stop; I don’t know how.
JT: Admirable… to keep steadily focused in the face of such intense doubt. What started it all?
DB: Early in my marathon I had a chat with a knowledgeable veteran in the writing world. She told me that my project was a wonderful thing if I was doing it for the right reasons. Growth as a writer, a sense of personal achievement—that sort of thing. I confessed to her that I’m doing it for the wrong reasons. My goal is to make the break at long last through the use of guerrilla tactics.
In practical terms, I’m hoping to find a publisher who will let me turn 24novels.com into a nonfiction book. I remain hopeful that all this will translate into something tangible.
JT: Aside from maybe Dickens, the goal for most writers is quality not quantity; however, your determination to quantify your creativity on extreme deadlines gives the finger to that idea. Does any part of the craft of writing become threatened along the way when you are pushed so hard?
DB: The idea that material produced slowly is better than the stuff you churn out fast simply isn’t true for me, and I suspect it isn’t true for a great many writers. I started writing to a deadline when I took part in the 3-Day Novel Contest. The story I pounded out with a 72-hour timer ticking down was better than a lot of the stuff I produced old-school. It had energy and drive that much of my other material lacked. The fact that I liked what I wrote on the fly is one of the reasons I decided to undertake my “act of insanity”–writing twenty-four 3-day novels in one year.
I don’t believe any part of the craft is threatened by writing quickly and to a deadline. If things are messy, you can clean them up later.
JT: I like your metaphor of writing for the traditional publishing world as being akin to lobbing tennis balls into the ocean. If you could design your own cocktail called the Mixed Metaphor, what would it have in it?
DB: I like something I call the predicate reversal. Here’s an example from one of my 3-day novels, Whatsoever Things Are True: “The pitch meandered toward the plate with the fierce resolve of a tree sloth on Valium.”
JT: Okay, so we’ll leave the cocktail mixing to Tom Cruise and North Korea. Why 24 novels, specifically? Is there a mathematical equation behind your madness?
DB: At first I thought I’d try writing twelve 3-day novels in a year, but it didn’t seem over-the-top enough. I thought twenty-four in a year would be enough to warrant the title “The ultimate act of writing insanity.” Producing two a month, on average, has been taxing, to be sure. But I’ve still managed to have a life outside my marathon.
6.5 pages a day would be sweet. Actually that’s about the speed at which my full-length novel, Cambrian, was written. And it gave me a draft in three months—which is a pretty standard timeframe. These 3-day novels are really novella length: 22,000 to 25,000 words. And the clock doesn’t stop for snacks or sleep breaks, so I need to churn out about 8,000 words a day during each entry.
JT: Where does editing fit in? Do you do it as you go or do you go back to it after?
DB: Editing gets short shrift in this kind of exercise, no question. I try to read over each page before moving on to the next one, but I confess I don’t always The more first drafts you write at speed the cleaner they become, but things can still get messy, especially when I’m tired. The producers of the 3-day novel contest make a great point: they expect some typos and clumsy sentences in the submissions they receive, on the rather pragmatic grounds that the thing was produced in three days.
JT: So many indie authors seem to ignore the principles (and benefits) of good web design when promoting themselves online. Your website is clean, yet gritty and very well organized. Are you tech savvy?
DB: Glad you like the site! I see computers as televisions attached to typewriters. They tend to break down when I look at them sidewise, much to my wife’s consternation. Thankfully I have some great techies in my corner. My sister-in-law, Rhonda Gunaratnam, designed 24novels.com, and my friend Cory Taylor wrote the software that lets people watch as I write live online.
JT: Say you have no backups of your work. The Interweb combusts tomorrow in a fantastical explosion of red-hot nothingness, and your work becomes forever buried under cybersmithereens. After smashing your head into your keyboard, do you die a little inside or are you just glad you did it at all?
DB: It happened! Or I thought it did. One morning, on day three of an entry, I trudged to my computer to find my library page blank. Every story in my marathon had disappeared. Amid palpitations I checked my active page, where I write the story in progress. It was a big black wall, like the obelisk in 2001. For a while it looked like everything was gone, and I was a wreck. If that’s the measure of a man, then I am a pathetic, snivelling toddler.
But the words came back. They wouldn’t stay away. And I’ll never stay away from them either.
JT: Do you have a day job? If so, does it most often fuel your fire or put it out? What did or do you do?
DB: I’m a private music teacher by day. Maybe that helps. Christopher Hitchens said that every novelist he knows has some kind of musical inclination.
I’m also a preacher, a kind of C.S. Lewis Christian. The writer in me is a hopeless liberal democrat. Those two aspects are at war all the time. I often feel like a polarized America of one, with a Republican and Democrat having a slugfest inside of me. But even that kind of incongruity can be useful for a writer. That tension gave birth to my horror novel Cambrian.
JT: The writer inside me is claustrophobic. Republicans and Democrats sparring in the ring… who would you most like to see duke it out? Remember, the first rule of non-partisan Fight Club is that the Democrat must start off with one hand tied behind his back.
DB: John Kerry and Sarah Palin. I’d bring lots of popcorn to that smackdown.
JT: What happens after November 5th?
DB: The goal, really, isn’t just to finish my marathon. It’s to sell a proposal that would let me turn 24novels.com into a nonfiction book. Beyond that, I plan to settle back into the routine that my act of insanity has rudely interrupted: a sensible daily flow of some 1,250 words. I can’t wait to see where they take me.
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Jennifer Thompson likes to think she hasn’t sold out to The Man. When not writing computer manuals and other business spin-doctory, she writes for fun and has had a modicum of creative success in Adbusters, SMUT Magazine, and several other information superhighway poetry, fiction, and humour publications. She is currently enjoying reviewing submissions and other fun endeavors at Black Heart.
