Sunday, August 9, 2009

Shouting Infinity?

I want to try a fairly ridiculous stunt this fall for NaNoWriMo, but first I want to talk about it in a way that should show if it's worth doing or not. My plan would shut out that popular fifth symbol that's so hard to work around, but I want to do it in a way that won't look as though I'm doing a bunch of cocky grammatical gymnastics to avoid it. Fifty thousand words is a damn gigantic goal to start with, but to do it this way runs toward downright insanity. How am I going to stop it all from sounding as though I'm straining to sound normal, and how am I going to do that for fifty thousand words if I'm not a particularly fast typist to start with?

I'm studying what I'm going up against right now, and it turns out that what I'm trying to do is known as a lipogram. A book known as Gadsby is what I'm trying to outdo with this particular kind of lipogram; it's also fifty thousand words long, but it it took far upwards of my thirty days to finish. So what I'd do would still qualify as a fairly significant thing.

But I don't know... It's taking a lot of work just to wrap my brain around what I'm doing right now, with this blog post, and this is just a microscopic dot of what I'd find my sorry ass staring down if I bound my hands this way for a full month of quick typing. Could it possibly work? Could I find a story that would sound okay in this format? Writing this way isn't as much fun as I thought, but I'm still just finding my way. It could smooth out if I just plug away at it for days and days, couldn't it? I still don't know if I can summon up that kind of gumption, though. What do you think? Is it worth it?