You thought NaNoWriMo was hard? Try writing a novel in three days.
The International 3-Day Novel Contest has taken place every Labour Day weekend since 1977. That year, a group of Vancouver writers challenged themselves to write a novel in three days. The results were disastrous and embarrassing, but a literary contest of Iron Man proportions was born. Since 2005, 3-Day Books imprint is home to the contest, and each year’s winners are distributed by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Mark Sedore, a graduate student in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University and a communications officer for the president’s office at the University of Toronto, is the 2009 champion. His book, Snowmen, about a man who walks across the Arctic while fighting off a brother who is trying to sabotage him along the way, topped over 500 other entrants to take the top prize.
Mark sat down with Books@Torontoist to talk about this experience.
Torontoist: Why did you enter the contest?
Mark Sedore: This is the third year I entered. The first time I entered I was shortlisted. Last year, I came in second. I didn’t expect that. Before I even knew the results last year, I decided I wanted to enter again. It was a lot of fun.
TO: What attracts you to this contest? Writing a novel in three days seems crazy!
MS: I found out about it a more than a year before I first entered and just bookmarked the site. I went back to it the August before entering and was just like “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.” I like writing and have written unpublished novels before. It seemed like a good way to buckle down and force yourself to frenetically write for 72 hours and see what you come up with. It’s very productive process and a very good idea.
TO: Tell me about the book.
MS: Snowmen is about these brothers who are adults and don’t get along. The younger brother is very rich and kind of famous. The older brother is a struggling music therapist. The younger brother finds out he’s going to die from brain cancer. He decides he wants to do something great before he dies. Their father was from Russia and his culture and the North played an important part in his life. The younger brother decides he’s going to honour his father and raise money for charity by walking across the Arctic. He sets it all up and gets lots of corporate donations. Then two things happen. First, he’s hospitalized and can’t walk. Second, the economy crashes. The corporations think they have a way out now, because he can’t do the trip anymore. The older brother decides, on his own, without consulting his younger brother, that he’s going to do the walk for him and hold these corporations accountable. His younger brother is dead set against this. He doesn’t want his brother to steal his idea or to take the fame. The food drops are already planned and mapped out so the older brother is like “Screw it. I’m just doing this.” He steals all the equipment and holds a press conference calling out the corporations. Eventually, they cave and pay out their donations. Then he starts his trip. He doesn’t have contact with the world, but is being followed by his GPS. Everyone can see how he’s going. His brother in the hospital realizes that he’s actually going to do it. So he, being rich and having connections, decides he’s going to do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t happen. He messes with the locations of the food drops and sends his brother on to fake drops with terrible food. Eventually, the younger brother decides to not send him food at all.
TO: Did you do any research into Arctic exploration and survival?
MS: I did a lot of research online when I was writing it. But I’ve been up north a bunch of times and was in Iceland in the spring, so I used a lot of what I learned during those trips in the book.
TO: When and how did the concept for the book come about?
MS: I came up with the idea the prior winter. I spent the prior winter break up in Whitehorse. It’s crazy in the winter up there. Everything is closed and no one goes outside. When they do go outside, it’s to run from their cars to the bank machine and back to their cars. They don’t even have mittens or hats, they are just running. I thought that was cool, I want to write about a guy who walks across the Arctic and I want to write about brothers. I’ve written from the perspective of a younger brother before, but not from the perspective of the older brother. Other than that, I didn’t sketch out too many details until a week or two prior to the contest. I didn’t bother to create an outline, but I started mapping out the narrative in my head. Going into writing, I knew where I wanted the story to go and what would happen.
TO: What was the creative process like?
MS: The contest runs the Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I know a lot of people like to get a really good sleep on Friday night, get up Saturday morning and start writing. I don’t do that. I stay up until midnight and then at midnight, I start writing. I write until I’m done, then go to sleep. Once I wake up, I start writing again. It’s fitful naps and occasional walks. This year, it was different. The first two years, I wrote it at my house on the Danforth. I kicked my wife out and had the entire place to myself. This year, I’m in a writing group. We all decided it would be a great thing for us to do this contest together. We went up to a friend’s cottage and kept everyone away and just wrote the whole time. We sequestered ourselves in separate rooms with the understanding we weren’t allowed to interrupt anybody if they were writing. We had a common area and if you were there, it was neutral space. We also brought a whiteboard to leave notes like “Does anyone want to go out for food at 4 o’clock?” or “Does anyone want to go for a swim tomorrow morning?” And we just wrote.
TO: What was the writing process like?
MS: It’s exhausting. I don’t do an outline, but the contest is three days. It’s 24 chapters over three days. I make sticky notes from 1 to 24. As I write a chapter, I can take a sticky note down. It feels really good. I’d recommend that process to anyone. The first two years, I crammed as much actual writing into the three days as I could. I wrote and wrote and wrote and left myself maybe three or four hours on the final day to edit. You get very little feedback in this contest unless you do very well. Last year, when I came in second, they called me on the phone. They were like “Hey, you’re one of our finalists. We’re considering you for first prize. We need to ask you a few questions.” Then Melissa [Edwards, the managing editor] dropped a comment that said “So you write a lot longer than our other entrants.” This is the first time I ever knew that. I was pushing myself to write 60,000 words, thinking that was a short novel. I decided this year I’d write less and spend more time editing. I tried to write the whole thing in two days, so I could spend one day editing. It didn’t work out perfectly, but I spent about twelve hours editing on Monday.
TO: How did the book evolve or change through the writing process?
MS: I like to get an idea and read as much non-fiction about the topic as I can. I was reading this Oliver Sacks book, Musicophilia, about the relationship between the brain and music. It looked at people with perfect pitch, stuff like that. I saw him on The Daily Show and wanted to get his book. So I did. As I read, I was bookmarking pages for the contest. When I’m stuck, I like to go back to one of these bookmarks and just start writing about that. I was hoping this idea would be a big theme in the book. But it was nothing! Like nothing at all! The younger brother is this deranged and vindictive guy. He also has Asperger’s. This is something I came up with the day of. I didn’t know anything about Asperger’s. I ended up spending a lot of time online during the contest researching this. It ended up being a big part of the book and I didn’t plan for that at all.
TO: Now that you’ve won, what’s the next step or your book?
MS: The winner gets a chance to work with an editor at 3 Day Books. We work on it together to make it actually publishable. I’ve read it since submitting it and there are parts that are crazy and delirious. In the space of one paragraph, I’m writing about what a beautiful May day it is and how all the leaves are changing colour because it’s fall. Clearly, that’s crazy and I have no idea what I was writing. I also get to work with a designer and pick out a couple cover designs, which is cool. Thy make the designs, but I get to work with him to make sure it’s a cover I like. The book will be published in the summer.
TO: Tell me about your writing career.
MS: I started out writing a scouting ‘zine with my friend. It wasn’t sanctioned or anything. It had a lot of swears in it and I don’t think Scouts Canada would approve of it. We did that for two and half years. Then I got a full-time job writing for Mel Lastman. His term ended, so I started writing for David Miller. A job opened up writing for the president of University of Toronto Press. Letters, emails, press releases – that kind of thing. Then the president’s speechwriter retired and I covered that while they searched for a new speechwriter. When they hired someone, I kept some speech-writing responsibilities. As for fiction, I just assume everyone in the world wants to be a novelist. Don’t you? Novels are nice and fun and when you read one, you’re like, wow, I wish I could do that. I’ve always wanted to do that and write fiction whenever I can. I hoped to be published someday. Not necessarily through this contest, as I never expected to win, but sometime in the next ten year. It just happened differently and faster than I expected.
TO: What’s next? Do you have any new projects in the works?
MS: I’m probably not going to enter the contest again. Although, there’s the option of entering as a team. I might to do that. That would be an interesting creative experience. Maybe frustrating, but it would be fun. What I think I’ll do now is take the one that I wrote last year and turn that into something publishable. The 3-Day Novel people seemed to like it, so I’m going to spend some time on that and see if it goes anywhere.
Snowmen will be released by 3-Day Books in August 2010.
