Remembering the Marathon…

Marathoners share their thoughts on marathons past…

2008 Muskoka Novel Marathoners Speak:

Martin Avery

Zen In The Art Of Overcoming Monkey Mind At A Novel Marathon

I am against competition but I love novel marathons. Nobody wrote more than me in the novel marathon in Owen Sound or Muskoka until Fred Ford came up with some other writers from the Writers Circle of the Durham Region. It was the second year of the Muskoka Novel Marathon and I could see from the start that he was going to kick my butt.

While I stood at the old bar of the abandoned restaurant where we held the marathon in those days, punching at the keys of my iMac like Hemingway, I imagined, Fred sat in front of his computer, put a big set of headphones over his ears, cranked up the classical music he loved, and wrote like a madman, oblivious to what was happening to the writers around him.

We honked a bicycle horn whenever we finished another ten pages. Fred never noticed.

Dorothea Helms, also representing the WCDR, brought up an assortment of toys she broke out to play with every time she finished another ten pages. Fred took no notice of any of them – not even the battling nuns and rabbis puppets the rest of us played with.

I asked him how he did it. He said he trained for the marathon for twenty-four days, writing for one hour on the first day, two hours on the second day, and so on, until he was ready to write non-stop each day of the marathon.

Kevin Craig beat Fred Ford and me and everyone else at The Great Canadian Winter Novel Marathon at the Pickering Public Library. I was amazed. I don’t know how he did it. Fred trained for it and he was writing fast with the soundtrack of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ playing loudly in his ears.

How did Kevin beat him? He wouldn’t say.

The excuse I used for finishing second, instead of writing the most, at those marathons was that I was an organizer or producer of the marathons and I had to take time out to keep things running.

When I handed over the Muskoka Novel Marathon to the Muskoka Literacy Council, I could no longer use that excuse.

Kevin Craig showed up at the Muskoka Novel Marathon. Fred Ford and I dropped out. Kevin won the award for being the most prolific writer, which is a trophy made out of the bicycle horn we honk after writing ten pages.

This year, I trained like Fred Ford and I used a strategy I learned from a pair of cross country runners when I was a kid. I used to race in the mile and longer events when I was a kid and I did well despite the fact I was not built like a runner. I was built like a hockey player, or a writer. The best runners are tall, thin, have long legs, are designed like birds or raptors, I have learned. I’m no raptor.

The two runners who beat me when I was a kid were twins who finished ‘one-two’ at cross country races across the province. They took turns winning. One would set the pace and the other would slingshot past him in the sprint to the finish.

Setting the pace is harder than following the leader, they told me.

The Will Ferrell movie called Talladega Nights or The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby explains how the slingshot works with Nascar races.

Before the 2008 MNM, I trained like Fred Ford, writing more and more every day. I also trained by doing daily sitting meditation and qi gung energy exercises. Meditation gets rid of the ‘monkey mind” or internal chatter, including the inner critic, which slows down so many writers. I warmed up for the marathon by writing a non-fiction book called Zen Writing: Mitchell’s Messy Method, Zen Meditation, And The Zen Of Novel Marathons. It’s part memoir, with descriptions of W.O. Mitchell teaching his method of writing, called Freefall, and my Zen guru teaching meditation, with instruction on how to do Zen writing at novel marathons. By the time of the marathon, I was ready to write non-stop for days and rarin’ to go.

At the Muskoka Novel Marathon in the summer of 2008, I let Kevin Craig set the pace. I wrote ten pages and honked the bicycle horn and then he honked the horn right after me. For the next two days, he honked that horn just before me, again and again. We posted our scores on a big board and the scoreboard showed that we were running neck-in-neck, with him in the lead, Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday. We slept very little on Friday night and Saturday night. I got an hour, sleeping on the floor, on Friday, slept in the sun for an hour on Saturday afternoon, slept on a desk for two hours on Saturday night, and in the sun, again, on Saturday afternoon.

I no longer had to keep the marathon running but I tried to do my part to keep the energy humming. For instance, I took up a “Screaming Slingshot Monkey” and I sent it flying across the room whenever things seemed too quiet. It screams as it flies through the air and it screams some more when it hits a wall or a ceiling or lands on the floor.

Other writers used the screaming monkey, too. Some used it, or abused it, to relieve tension or frustration. The monkey was kidnapped, at one point, by someone who could not stand the noise or distraction.

Sling Shot Monkey Lounging in the B.I.C. Trophy

I came to see the monkey as the perfect symbol for the novel marathon, the ideal objective correlative, representing ‘monkey mind’ and alluding to the old saying about a room full of monkeys with typewriters and the odds one of them would eventually crank out the works of Shakespeare.

Kevin Craig never took time off to play with the monkey. He was in the zone, apparently, writing fast but not furiously.

Kevin drove to a nearby cottage to sleep, briefly, on Saturday. When he returned on Sunday, he reported seeing two bears and three deer. A writer who lives in the area said she had never seen a bear or a deer in all the years she lived there.

We concluded Kevin was so sleep deprived he was hallucinating. I could tell it was almost time for me to make my move and take the lead.

When Kevin passed out or fell asleep at his keyboard, I made my move.

When he woke up, he said his face was on the keyboard and his nose was pressed against the letter “l”. – He had seven pages of “l”s, he reported.

That was when I sling-shotted past him.

Kevin wrote 140 pages in two days, which is incredible. I kept writing on the third and final day of the marathon and finished with 200 pages – a personal best.

Over the past couple of years, I have written biographies of two Canadian athletes, Alexandra Orlando and Karen Cockburn, who trained to compete at the Olympics in China, and I learned a lot from them. The main thing I learned is that it is all about training.

The first year I did the 3 day novel marathon, I was happy to complete fifty pages. A few years later, I was amazed when I cranked out one hundred pages. The first time I did NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – I found it a huge challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, despite my marathon experience. The second year, it was relatively easy. Last year, I wrote 70,000 words during NaNoWriMo.

It’s all about writing practice, which we call Zen writing.

Evelyn Pollock

 

 

 

I totally enjoyed the experience of velcroing myself to a chair and writing for two days at the 2008 Muskoka Novel Marathon. As a novice, I arrived on Friday afternoon not knowing what I would be writing. Miraculously, the words flowed and I produced 65 pages of a story titled: Skeletons in the Closet of the Palace of Knowledge.

It was wonderful sharing space with so many interesting and talented writers. The air vibrated with energy. Next year, count me in for the full three days! It was great fun -next year we should find time to read our favourite paragraph to the group. Thanks to everyone, especially Susan and Martin – for creating a wonderful experience for such an excellent cause – Literacy.

Please visit again soon to read what others have to say about the novel marathon experience.