A 3 day novel success

Four years ago this weekend, I competed in the 3-Day Novel Competition for the first time. It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be the first time through (subsequent efforts have been much more painful and far less productive). I had three solid characters, an interesting narrative voice, and some fantastic themes. What I lacked was a detailed plot synopsis. As a result, one of my characters at one point found himself with nothing to do and thus took off on a road-trip. When he got to where he was going, he turned around and came back. Those are the sorts of decisions that you don't have time to second-guess in a weekend. Twice, I wrote myself into corners and ended up discarding a few pages of decent but misguided writing. There were also times when I was writing as much as 2000 words in an hour, and every word of it felt right. By the time Monday afternoon rolled around, I was close enough to completion that I allowed myself the luxury of watching the Esks/Stamps labour day game.

I didn't win, but I was fairly happy with the results; I had for the first time completed a novella length manuscript, about 22000 words about three people in a small town on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border and a narrator who connected their lives. About eight months later, my good friend Correy offered me the chance to go hang out with him on Mayne Island for a week as a sort of creative retreat, and so I brought my 3-day novel with me and began the first of about eight major rewrites. Now, within two months, it'll be published. It's more than tripled in length and very few of the original words remain. The end has been rewritten about 12 times and the beginning probably double that. Still, there's a significant element of that initial draft still alive in it. I could have spent a year and taken far more care in writing the first draft, and I likely still would have rewritten the entire thing several times over.

I'm currently occupied with final edits to the manuscript, but with the long weekend only four days away, I'm rattling some ideas for my next novel around in the back of my head and in notebooks, and I'm wondering if I can afford to take some time this weekend to try the 3-Day Novel again. I'm not sure this set of ideas are as well-suited: Correction Road has a nice, tight story that occurs over a single month; the novel I'm planning out is much greater in scope. An attempt to write out even a basic draft of it in a weekend may be a complete disaster, I'll see where my level of energy is and make a decision by friday... Either way, I feel somewhat obligated to champion the contest, as it ended up being a very important step in my evolution as a writer.