Two dozen writers, five of them from Squamish, have signed up to participate in a 48-hour novel-writing marathon called the Collective Novel Experiment.
Organized by the Whistler Writers Group, the event will play out in conjunction with the 2005 Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival over 48 consecutive hours between 6 p.m. Friday (April 8) and 6 p.m. Sunday (April 10). Writers will take two-hour shifts writing in the fishbowl setting of a 1960s-era Whistler gondola in the middle of town.
"The idea essentially was to think about the way ideas incubate," said Whistler Group writer Lisa Richardson. "A greenhouse would be appropriate but in a mountain town a gondola's an obvious replacement to let you see ideas incubate and see somebody at work."
Five Squamish writers - John Moore, Kevin Damaskie, Christina Nick, Shelley Donald and David Burke - are among the writers who will each take their turn adding chapters to the rough outline of the story. The group workshopped the basic premise of a famous Whistler resident's wake at Tapley's. The back-story was left intentionally wide open to allow for as much creativity as possible. Even the death is a mystery.
"It's so open-ended that you can take off with it in just about any direction you want, or pick up a line from anybody else," said Moore. "And it leaves the writer the most freedom to come up with whatever plot comes out of it."
Moore said he expects the event to be "an enormous amount of fun." He doesn't know where he will place in the order of writers, but a late night shift would work for him.
He does have one concern however: "It hadn't occurred to me to ask before whether this freakin' gondola will be heated or not. Sitting in a freezing gondola for two hours in the middle of the night is not my usual writing setup."
What will be done with the novel once it's complete is still undecided, but the group fully intends make the work public and it is "taking suggestions," said Richardson.
