Nobody Said They Had to Write Good Novels

By SUSAN CARPENTER

Dec. 30, 2001 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

There were no book contracts for “winners” of this event, just a gold paper crown and cold beer for finishers who attended the Thank God It’s Over party in San Francisco--one of a dozen held worldwide.

Of the more than 5,000 who tried, about 700 wrote their way to the finish line of National Novel Writing Month in November (“Releasing Their Inner Novelist” Oct. 26). With e-mail files as proof, they succeeded in writing 50,000 words, many of them just minutes before the midnight deadline on Nov. 30.

Last year, only 29 would-be novelists went the distance, forgoing social lives, bills and, in some cases, laundry in favor of penning a novel. The year before that, six finished.

As with the previous two years, many of this November’s new novels were awful. They ended with a whimper even if some of them started with a bang, like David Cassel’s “Under the Sun,” which began, “Sometimes she fantasized about poisoning the coffee.”

Cassel was one of about 200 gonzo novelists who showed up for a Bay Area soiree, toting printed excerpts from their novels and paper-clipping them to a clothesline strung along the back wall. In the party-ambient dim light, revelers read lines from their novels--”Still Life With Monkeypants,” “Squish Band,” “Hot Metal and Methadrine” and others.

Most dressed as requested, as characters from their writing--though more than a few dressed as themselves (then again, many had written thinly veiled autobiographies). Amelia Urban, 24, of San Francisco and author of “On the Other Side of the Telesnork,” trailed a tail and wore a pair of cat ears strapped atop her braided red hair. Dan Strachota, author, most recently, of “Missed Connections,” sported a fake mustache and polyester print pants to keep character as a man dressing as a woman dressed as a man.

Orchestrating this was NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty, whose book was titled “The Heart, Felt Clean.” He was masquerading as a crime scene cleaner in a medical waste contamination suit.

Days later, Baty, 28, was suffering from the condition plaguing many of the participants--Post NaNoWriMo Depression Syndrome--or PNDS as one word-drained writer called it. Plus, as word of the event spread this year, the usually low-key Baty found himself sought out for media interviews and the publicity threw him for a loop.

Even he is surprised by the number of people who decided to participate in something he created on a lark. The realization that, whatever their individual merits, “there are 700 new novels out there that weren’t there before” is dizzying.

How did it happen?

“With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere,” he said. “Aiming low is the best way to succeed.”