This past November, I participated in the NovNov challenge, which took over from NaNoWriMo.  Although I’ve played around with doing NaNoWriMo a couple of times, I never officially joined, so this was my first time signing up.  I would have gotten the 50k words in if I hadn’t had major computer and internet issues—I could only write by hand for a week! 😒 But what finally made it easy to write 1,667 plus words a day was joining the online writing sprints offered by the NovNov sponsor, and discovering that they’re the best thing since sliced bread.

Actually, they’re much, much better.  In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that discovering virtual writing sprints may be one of the best things that’s happened to me in years.  I just wish I’d found something like them a long time ago; if I had, I’d probably have more than a dozen novels written by now—and I’m not joking.

Happily, the NovNov sponsor (a UK company that makes a program for writers called ProWritingAid) has continued to run sprints as part of the numerous activities they’re offering in conjunction with a writing contest.  One of their videos is a ‘bootcamp course’ on writing.  I was impressed with the way the course succinctly covers a lot of important material.  While probably eighty to ninety percent of the points it addresses are things I already do—often unconsciously—likely because I’m an experienced writer, it made an excellent and encouraging review.  I would particularly recommend it for young writers (or anyone relatively new to the craft, regardless of age).

One of the things stressed in the ‘bootcamp course’ was the importance of hooking the reader from the get-go.  It points out that an essential element of that hook comes from the main character currently experiencing—or having just experienced—something that changes their life in such a way that it’s impossible for things to go back to the way they were before. When I was thinking about that, I recalled something that gave me a very good laugh.

I may have mentioned elsewhere in this blog that one of my absolute all-time favorite novel openings is from Gene Wolfe’s Nightside the Long Sun (a book which also has a very awesome title!).  The first line alone is intense and surprising because of the juxtaposition of the profound and numinous concept of ‘enlightenment’ with the relatively mundane setting of a ball game.  Then the reader is plunged deep into the world of the novel with the speed and force of an Olympic platform diver knifing through the water to the bottom of the pool; one powerful image comes after another, and the language that he uses to paint those pictures is so gorgeous (even when describing unpleasant things!) that it’s absolutely breathtaking. The first time I read it, I thought, “This is what I want to be able to do: to write skillfully enough to pull off something this brilliant.”  (Silly me—I’ve always been too ambitious for my own good.) 🤯

I recently read an anthology of Mr. Wolfe’s short fiction, and the way the stories demonstrated the depth and breadth of his knowledge about everything from science and history to literature and music was staggering (not to mention how eerily prescient many of his stories written in the 60’s and 70’s were about disturbing things happening today).  After rereading the opening pages of Nightside for the first time in a few years, it occurred to me that the man probably had an IQ of 200, and that what he could do with the English language likely requires nothing less than that, so the rest of us mere mortals probably shouldn’t aspire to emulate his skill. 😢

But here’s the amusing part regarding the advice about starting at a point where the character can no longer return to ‘the way things were before.’ Not only does the first line of Nightside illustrate that aptly, it does so very literally . . . 😉

That opening sentence is: “Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that.”

I suppose we might say, “Well, that’s one way to do it!” 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣