Baking the Books

My sister bought me a bread maker, so I’ve been baking my own bread recently.  Now some people, undoubtedly, think this is a bit of a cheat, as what the machine cuts out all the kneading, knocking down, more kneading etc – but I choose what goes in there and the end result tastes fantastic.

You put all the ingredients in, set the machine (which is really a mini oven with a mixing blade) and three hours or so later, out comes a loaf.

I was thinking about the bread maker when I read about an event called NaNoWriMo on the mystery website, DorothyL. NaNoWriMo (I can’t say it without doing a cod Chinese accent) is short for National Novel Writing Month.

That’s the first little hint to be wary.  Is your life so frantic that you haven’t got time for a few extra syllables?  Even when – granted that language is meant to be a means of communication – your listener or reader hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about?  Chill, guys.  You can write shorthand, but do you have to speak it?

So what is National Novel Writing Month?  Well, the idea is to write 50,000 words in a month.   If you’re not used to thinking in word counts, it’s useful to know that’s an awful lot, but the shortest published novels are usually round the 60-65 thousand words, which is 10-15,000 words short.  A usual sort of average for a writer is something around a 1,000 or so words a day.

Some writers, of course, write a great deal faster.  Barbara Cartland could knock out a book in a fortnight or so, Edgar Wallace dictated a entire novel in the course of a weekend (it’s called The Devil Man if you’re curious) and there are a good few others, most famously, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days.  However, these surely are the exceptions.

The point of writing is to be read. And, by and large, the way to write the very best you can, is to plan it.  Then to write it.  And then to go over it, however many times it takes.  And, incidentally, take time to do lots more planning on the way.  If you are bursting with inspiration, as Stevenson was, don’t hang about, certainly, but that story came to him in a dream.  That means his subconscious was bubbling away with it for how long beforehand?

Surely the most likely result of driving yourself nearly mental for a month to produce 50,000 words is to have a sort of literary fast food, when, with more time, you could have a gourmet meal.

To go back to the bread maker, the flour, milk and yeast etcetera go in the pan, together with any added extras that occur to you.  It all, to be honest, looks a real mess and the only result of tucking into the bread-in-waiting at this stage would be a long, thoughtful stint on the loo!  But give it time and heat, those separate elements miraculously transform into a delicious loaf.   So give it some time.  Anything less is half-baked!