Charette
"an intensive effort to complete something before the deadline." Grandiloquent Dictionary Online
Charette. That sums up my lack of posts on this blog for the last week. It was a combination of 3 midterm exams, 3 assignments, and 1 take-home exam that did the mischief.
But, in general, there does tend to be more effort when there is a deadline in view. If I were to plan to write a book eventually, where "eventually" has a vague sense of infinite time, it would probably never be written or even started. However, with the right inspiration (a fast-approaching deadline and a large word count) a novel can be quickly written. In fact, it can be written in 3 days.
Now would be a good time to introduce my favourite contest of the year, the 3-day novel contest. Yes, that's right; write a novel in 3 days. It's a contests that happens over Labour Day weekend, where no one has an excuse not to try because they're working. Supposedly, Voltaire wrote Candide in a 3-day-novel-writing frenzy, but Candide is fast and furious enough to be written in 3 days. The only problem is that a novel is usually something that takes place over a long period of time, which you can hardly hope to imitate in three measly days - unless, of course, you're some aristocratic French philosopher with a funny penname (doesn't Voltaire know you're supposed to have two names? But, then again, I guess Stendhal didn't either.).
If you prefer a longer novel writing contest, I recommend NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. Here, in the month of September, every sloth too afraid of the charette of a 3-day deadline can write their gruesomely, dreadfully, melodramatic novels. The only catch here is that a "novel" defined in the NaNoWriMo world has 50,000 words, which I can tell you from experience is hard to achieve, no matter how much gibberish you stuff the pages in.
With the fruits of the pressures of deadlines in mind, I leave you to enter one or both of these wonderful contests. The novels produced are often low in quality (my flow of consciousness novel in the style of Faulkner certainly didn't catch on with the judges) but are good souvenirs of a starving writer. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Charette. That sums up my lack of posts on this blog for the last week. It was a combination of 3 midterm exams, 3 assignments, and 1 take-home exam that did the mischief.
But, in general, there does tend to be more effort when there is a deadline in view. If I were to plan to write a book eventually, where "eventually" has a vague sense of infinite time, it would probably never be written or even started. However, with the right inspiration (a fast-approaching deadline and a large word count) a novel can be quickly written. In fact, it can be written in 3 days.
Now would be a good time to introduce my favourite contest of the year, the 3-day novel contest. Yes, that's right; write a novel in 3 days. It's a contests that happens over Labour Day weekend, where no one has an excuse not to try because they're working. Supposedly, Voltaire wrote Candide in a 3-day-novel-writing frenzy, but Candide is fast and furious enough to be written in 3 days. The only problem is that a novel is usually something that takes place over a long period of time, which you can hardly hope to imitate in three measly days - unless, of course, you're some aristocratic French philosopher with a funny penname (doesn't Voltaire know you're supposed to have two names? But, then again, I guess Stendhal didn't either.).
If you prefer a longer novel writing contest, I recommend NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. Here, in the month of September, every sloth too afraid of the charette of a 3-day deadline can write their gruesomely, dreadfully, melodramatic novels. The only catch here is that a "novel" defined in the NaNoWriMo world has 50,000 words, which I can tell you from experience is hard to achieve, no matter how much gibberish you stuff the pages in.
With the fruits of the pressures of deadlines in mind, I leave you to enter one or both of these wonderful contests. The novels produced are often low in quality (my flow of consciousness novel in the style of Faulkner certainly didn't catch on with the judges) but are good souvenirs of a starving writer. Figuratively speaking, of course.
posted by Kay at 9:38 AM
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