Line Burners

You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

Again, to this point I had only done the tidy “first this writer, then that writer…” sort of round-robin story before. And yes, there remains the possibility — the likelihood — that with so many authors, and no plot decided upon in advance, the story will twist way beyond the expectations established at the outset (certainly in Writer 1’s mind!).

But Burning Lines throws in one additional feature (if that’s the word): it’s a free-for-all.

It’s been operational for about a week. As of the time I’m composing this, there have been 86 posts by a mix of ten to twelve trans-oceanic authors, and the length of the whole story so far is closing in on 15,000 words. Because there’s no posting schedule, a given post will occasionally step on the toes of another, at which point the authors work out the changes between them — going back to revise a post to smooth out the wrinkles, or changing a post’s status from Published to Draft, or (on at least one occasion) completely deleting a post. (We haven’t had a three-way overlap so far, but I’m assuming it’s only a matter of time.)

Sometimes silence will reign for hours at a time, a result of time-zone weirdness and/or real-life interruptions and/or a sudden twist in the plot — or an outrageous multimedia (photo, YouTube) interjection — which no one had anticipated, and which stops us in our tracks. Some posts help to weave things together, others suddenly yank it in one direction or another, and I’d say there’s a pretty high proportion of posts which make me grin, laugh, or sputter beverages in an unproductive direction.

Above all, it’s hard.

The main Burning Lines site is here; you will notice that the home page includes ONLY the most current post. Earlier ones (and comments) can be read by following the links in the archive on the home page’s right-hand menu — note that the listing there is in true chronlogical order.

You can also read a more or less up-to-date version of the entire story line all in one place here on RAMH.

Note: Besides not being completely current, this version does not indicate the author of each post, nor does it include comments and administrative posts; it’s just a convenience. Once you’ve caught up to the story line, I urge you either to visit the Burning Lines site itself frequently, or subscribe to its RSS (Atom) feed.

By the way, about the name “Burning Lines”: Kate came up with that, saying she’d based it on an Annie Dillard quote which said — exact words not remembered — “that it takes guts to write and determination to burn new lines in your palm.” I looked through a bunch of resources and it’s possible that the quote Kate had in mind is this, from The Writing Life:

The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what. A queer picture beds in the muscle like a worm encysted — some film of feeling, some song forgotten, a scene in a dark bedroom, a corner of the woodlot, a terrible dining room, that exalting sidewalk; these fragments are heavy with meaning. The line of words peels them back, dissects them out. Will the bared tissue burn? Do you want to expose these scenes to the light? You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard until the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood. If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.