Marathon Time

I may or may not have gone to Northwestern for college because of a charity event they hold annually called Dance Marathon. Gilmore Girls was still on then and, well, the dance marathon episode of Gilmore Girls was one of my all-time favorites (Bye Dean! Hello Jess!). Now, I have since learned that other colleges hold a dance marathon, but none are as long as Northwestern's. Thirty hours. Thirty straight hours of dancing.

Dance Marathon looks like this. In other words, madness.
Picture from Northwestern.edu

I participated my sophomore year, and today I realized some similarities between that experience and starting a new manuscript. (As you'd probably guess from the timing of this, I'm in the beginnings of a new manuscript right now.)

Our Dance Marathon is broken into ten blocks of three hours each. Between each block is a 15 minute break (though part of that break is spent climbing the stairs to your break room). The rest of the time is spent dancing.

Excitement and adrenaline is enough to get you through Block One. But three hours of dancing is still a lot of dancing. And I'll never forget the feeling of getting back in the break room after the first block and thinking, that wasn't TOO bad. Wait--I have to do that nine more times?

It's a lot like that first chunk of a new manuscript. I'll get this idea and enough of the plot figured out that I'm ready to start, and the words just sort of rush out. It all seems easy and invigorating. Then the realization sets in: there are thousands of words to go, and I have no idea what is going to happen for most of those, other than there might be a sailboat involved.

During Dance Marathon, when we hit the 15 hour mark the DJs put on "Livin' on a Prayer" and the thousand dancers sang with a newfound energy. "Ohh we're halfway there... oooohhhh, livin' on a prayer!" That part of a manuscript gives me the same feeling - I've completed more than I have left. Suddenly, it really seems like I can do it. Like I have enough ideas and I like the story enough that I WILL finish. There's no real doubt anymore.

Much like the first block of Dance Marathon, the final three hours were fueled almost entirely by adrenaline. The amount of money raised was revealed, people representing the charity the money was given to received a giant check on stage. In that moment, I remembered why I had just tortured my body through thirty hours of dancing. It was all worth it.

Each manuscript I've written was completed in a frenzy of words. I reached a point where I knew exactly how it was going to end, and I just wanted it written. Complete. And once I typed THE END, I knew exactly why I wrote all those words. I knew they weren't anywhere near the right words yet, but they were there.

In the first part of these long endeavors that sometimes feel impossible, it's not always easy to remember or envision the end. But as I start out on a new manuscript, that's what I'm going to try to do. Remember that I've done it before, and that everything that went into it was worth it.

Do you experience similar things at stages of your manuscript? What do you think about when you start a manuscript? And has anyone else ever done a Dance Marathon?

It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

My roommate is training for a marathon, and one night when she was talking about how many miles she was trying to run that week I realized how similar our goals for the summer were. Only, mine involves sitting in a chair and absolutely no physical activity.

See, she's never run a marathon before, and I've I'd never written a book before. The unknown of our separate treks is frightening - neither of us knows  knew what to expect. All we know are the proper steps to take. So she slowly builds up her endurance each week, and I sit sat down every night and wrote down words. Any words - not necessarily the right words, yet.

I change my present tense to past because somewhere along the way, I actually finished the novel. I kept pressing forward and when I encountered that unknown, I discovered that it wasn't really all that frightening. It was invigorating. I was happier than I had been in a very long time, and I accomplished a life-long goal.

Sometimes, when a writer is sitting at 20,000 words and has never written more than 30,000, finishing an actual novel seems impossible. Just like when you've only ever run five miles, or even 13 in a half marathon (as my roommate has), running 26 just seems like a frightening, unreachable amount. I can't tell you how many times I wrote just a few pages of a story and then stopped, thinking I didn't have it in me to write a couple of hundred pages.

So for anyone out there who is at the beginning - who has never reached the end - remember that writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint. You can't write a book in one sitting, just like you can't jump up one day and say "I'm going to go run a marathon right now." If you can't see yourself ever reaching the end, stop thinking about the end. Write a page at a time, every day. Build up your endurance. If you run one mile at a time, eventually you'll have run a marathon.