In Stephen King’s horror classic, The Shining, the central character, Jack Torrence goes a little crazy. He is a recovering alcoholic author, and he takes the opportunity to be the caretaker for a haunted (he doesn’t know that) hotel in Colorado with his wife and son. He accepts the opportunity because he wants to work on his book.
[Spoiler alert]
He goes freaking insane. In one of the famous scenes from the movie adaptation, Jack’s wife, Wendy, finds the manuscript that he’d been working on throughout their entire horrific stay. She discovers hundreds of pages with just one line, written in dozens of different ways.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Watch the YouTube Clip of the scene here.
Now, if you’re a writer, becoming homicidal is not a good idea. I strongly recommend against that. But I do believe that spending time writing fiction gives us an opportunity to use our mind in a way that we wouldn’t normally do. Maybe even go a little crazy, perhaps?
I started down a road with the characters and something happened: I started to watch them move instead of move them. I let them do what they would want to do in their heart. A world materialized that I never deliberately conceived and then I had a thought:
This is crazy!
Then, another thought crossed my mind. There are people all over the world doing the same thing – going a little insane. How cool! NaNoWriMo offers the opportunity for us to do something we wouldn’t normally do. So, I want to offer you three things that I encourage you to try in your race to 50,000 words.
1) Create a character in your story that you might have trouble befriending. If you work in an office, create a farmer. If you are bad at math, make him a genius when it comes to numbers. Then think about his motives, desires, and watch his behavior in the situation you put him in.
2) Imagine a world that’s different from yours. This is something that I just tried that I never thought I would. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow. But think about a place that you could only imagine: then imagine on paper.
3) Get comfortable with imperfect details. A great excuse that I hid behind for not writing a book was that I am not very detailed, and couldn’t imagine creating a perfectly detailed story that someone else wanted to read. But I realized that perfection is elusive. Art is messy. And people are moved by passion, not perfection.
It seems insane, but doing something the opposite of what you’d normally do is fun! Let’s go a little crazy and remember: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Keep cranking out those crazy words!