Banzai Writing
By Kathleen Bolton | June 8, 2009 |
You guys, I know this is my day to post something witty and learned, but I am so pooped, it is not gonna happen. In order to meet my editor’s deadline, I went way out of my comfort zone and wrote not only in the early morning but late into the night as well for over a week. I have hit the wall.
Weirdly, I think I got some of my best writing done in this not-ideal circumstance. Or maybe I’m so delirious I can’t tell anymore.
There’s something about having a gun to your head to make you stop fussing around and just. get. on. with. it. Stop agonizing over a word choice. Stop dithering over a way to get into a dialogue scene and leap into it. It was banzai, going-with-the-gut instinct writing. And it was strangely exhilarating.
Perhaps I’ll feel differently later, but I’m actually pretty proud of what I cranked out in such a short space. This is where having the fundamentals of writing internalized becomes a huge support. I don’t have to think about active verses passive sentence structure, how to build tension, how to have dialogue unfold without being littered with annoying tags. Of course I had to edit for tightness, but I was surprised at how clean my first draft looked.
Or again, maybe I’m delirious.
Have you tried banzai writing? (NaNoWriMo counts) How did it work out for you? Are there any tips you can pass along to others?
My biggest tip: put the stress in a box and go for it.
Image by ~art-ichaut.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
Oh, man, Kath, you deserve a massage after that ms is in. Good luck with this last stretch!
YAY, congrats on your banzai writing! Love that term.
Yeah, I visited Banzai writing the last two weeks of May. I hit over 3K almost every day and finished the book. Now, just to let you know, this is coming from a writer who could barely clock 100 words a day on this darn book.
I was beat! I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do, but I’m very proud that I pulled it off.
I was going to say, Sounds a lot like NaNoWriMo! I haven’t done that yet, but I’ve done mini-banzai sessions to meet deadlines for classes in college (yes fiction, not essays).
I think the trick to getting that same driving force without the “gun” is to switch off one’s Internal Editor. I haven’t yet learned how to do that, but it’s high on my priority list.
Good job, by the way! I’m glad you cranked it out, and I’m sure it’s quite good. :)
Love the term, and the idea, of banzai writing. Have only done in small spurts. Congrats on completing your goal.
Banzai works surprisingly well but it’s a finite endeavor. I can’t keep up the pace for more than a few weeks at a time, and I feel like a twisted dishrag after, but the progress I make is worth the short crash that follows.
Good ole NaNoWriMo. I never feel better than when I do something like that. I plowed through a first draft that way, then followed up with a second the next two months (slightly slower pace, but I basically trashed the first draft and still ended up with 100k by the end of the second). It died off once the spring semester started, but should start up again soon. Yaaaay!
it’s a major way of getting rid of writerly self-consciousness!!
Thanks everyone. Yup, I feel wrung out, brain very empty. It’s not the way to operate all the time, but it’s good to know that I can do it when I have to.
I did that once, to finish my last MS. Only after I had written The End (two weeks after, to be precise) was I able to realize what the whole book was actually about, so I had to go back and change a lot of stuff.
I was given a short-term deadline recently and, like you, it turned out to be exactly what I needed to turn off the Internal Editor. I think I even churned out some good stuff.
But I’m otherwise unpublished. I have no concrete goal that comes with built-in consequences if I don’t produce. If anyone has any good ideas on how to set myself up with one, I’m listening…