Chapter 2: What Is NaNoWriMo?

And suddenly my next chapter began. “Why am I writing this?” I asked myself. Of course, I knew the answer. It was a rhetorical question, another one of the literary devices I planned to use to improve the story and increase my word count. “It’s NaNoWriMo,” I answered myself. “I mentioned it in the last chapter.” “NaNoWriMo? What’s that?” I asked, pretending not to know and maintaining the illusion that this was a dialog, not a monolog. “NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month,” I answered. “The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The rules are pretty simple. Start after midnight November 1; finish before midnight November 30th. As far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, whatever you call a novel is a novel. Check out http://www.nanowrimo.org if you don’t believe me.” But the author believed what he had just said, and not just because it was November, and the author knew what he was writing, and not just because he was himself and knew what he was thinking, but because the chapter was now being narrated by another literary device. The author thought it was an omniscient narrator, a literary device that Wikipedia says: “could see and know everything that happens within the world of the story, including everything that all of the charac­ ters think and feel.” The Wikipedia was right, but the author was wrong. It was not an omni­ scient narrator. The narrator seemed omniscient because it could narrate what was in the author’s and other characters’ minds and because it could accurately narrate what would happen in the future of what the author thought would be a novel but which the narrator already knew would become a metanovel; for example, it knew that that on page 33 in the final draft, there will be a Chapter 5, which it knew will be called A Metanovel, in which the author will first decide that he is writing a metanovel; and because it knew that on Page 101, in a section called The Third Classic Blun­ der it will narrate how the author has made one of the classic blunders, the third one, in fact. Yet the narrator was not quite omniscient. It knows there will be a chapter called “The Not Quite Omniscient Narrator,” in which the narrator’s role in this metanovel will be narrated, but is not quite sure whether it will be chapter 10 or chapter 12, and is not quite sure whether it will appear on page 44, or 45, or 102. “I’m pleased to meet you,” said the author to the Not Quite Omniscient Narrator. The Not Quite Omniscient Narrator didn’t answer. Not that it couldn’t have answered. But as a matter of professional integrity it only narrated and never engaged in chit-chat. Right now it was narrating self-reflectively that it was wondering whether it would ever be­ come fully omniscient, and narrating that it was narrating that it was wondering. “Can we get back to NaNoWriMo?” The metanovel asked. “We need to keep this moving!” Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies Is That It? “Chapter 1 is about writing chapter 1. Chapter 2 is about why you are writing Chapters 1 and 2,” says my inner critic. Is that it? Are all the chapters going to be about writing chapters?” “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m still writing the first draft. I’ll let you know when I start editing.” “Please do,” says my inner critic, sarcastically. “I can hardly wait.” “No,” I report, as I start to edit. “There are going to be many different kinds of chapters. Some won’t be called chapters. And one will be about the worst day in my life.” “I remember that day,” says my inner critic. “You totally fucked up, didn’t you. Typical.” Self-Referential Metanovel Writing for Dmmies