writingbabe.com

Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at the online magazine Slate, announced this week that she’s going to write a novel online this month:

When we were told to take time off from our everyday beats to do some kind of ambitious, long-form journalism, my first instinct naturally was to do something legal. Then I thought I’d like to do the hardest thing I could imagine. Which is writing a novel and filing it chapter by chapter as I go. And that’s what I’m going to do, with you watching and helping. And I’m going to try to finish in less than four weeks.

Or, more accurately, she’s going to write chapters of what she labels a “chick lit” novel and post them serially. She’s also soliciting tidbits from her readers:

This project will rise or fall with your reader feedback: plot ideas, character ideas, funny stories about your nanny, funny stories about your wife or your e-mail. Suggestions for names, locations, twists, and resolutions are desperately sought. Send me your thoughts, encouragement, or dire warnings via e-mail, or post to our Facebook page. For instance, the first person to e-mail me the (not patently absurd) name of the protagonist’s divorce-lawyer husband at savingface.slate@gmail.com gets to name the guy. Seriously. It will appear in Chapter 1. Same for the family pet. First name gets it. I am leaning toward a cat or a rabbit.

I’m intrigued by this project for a variety of reasons. I find it fascinating that she’s going to incorporate reader input–it strikes me as comedy improv meets novel writing. Plugging in the “just right” anecdote from a reader seems, um, unlikely to make for much causal, character-driven growth.

Then again, is character growth important in “chick lit”? The name of this genre, and much of its content, sets my teeth on edge, so I can’t help being a bit disappointed by Lithwick’s admitted addiction to it:

For years, the joke around my house has been that there are two stacks of books on my side of the bed: One pile is about torture, Guantanamo, and military tribunals. The other is bright pink.

Lithwick is brilliant: her beat is the Supreme Court, and her reportage is nuanced and always interesting. And Lithwick has some bones to pick with the genre, too. She’s looking to uphold some of its conventions and upend others, but, she says, she can’t make any promises regarding shoes.

You can judge for yourself how she’s doing: Her first chapter is already up.

I wonder if the folks at National Novel Writing Month (November, in case you didn’t know), aka NaNoWriMo, have caught wind of this.