I Registered for the 3-Day Novel Contest Because Life was Going Just a Bit Too Well for Me

It’s possible I am some sort of masochist

If you had asked me a year ago if it was possible to write a novel in three days, I would have scoffed at you. “A bad one,” I would have said, swirling tea around in an expensive wine glass. “A stupid one, maybe.”

But in 2024 I got the chance to interview the wonderful Pat Dobie about her book The Tenants, written in yes, 72 hours, for yes, a little something called the 3-Day Novel contest, and yes, reading it changed my mind on what is possible in a mere three days. So now I am throwing my hat in the ring for 2025.

The contest takes place every year over labour day weekend, and the rules are pretty lax except for one thing: you can only start putting words on the page after 12:01 a.m. on the Saturday, and must finish before 11:59 p.m. on the Monday. Imagine if those last two minutes were like, all you needed to actually finish it. Watch me sit at my desk on 11:59 p.m. September 1^st like, “if only I had two more minutes!”

There are no technical limitations to word count, but it is called the 3-Day Novel Contest not the 3-Day 2 Sentence Poem Contest, so generally the organizers recommend writing between 90-150 pages of Arial size 11 double-space font. For all the writers who think in word counts instead, that’s around 30-40K words, which is a little over 11.5K words a day, for three days straight.

I knew I wanted to try it out myself while I was talking to Dobie, and decided to make the plunge and register early this month. It was only after the site took my $49 and thanked me for registering that I started to panic.

11.5K words a day is not something I’ve ever done. I’ve written around 30-40K words in a few months? I once wrote 50K in a month for the-writing-challenge-that-must-not-be-named, but I also haven’t participated in said unnamed challenge for a few years, and even still, 50K in 30 days is only like 1.5K words a day. My initial excitement to throw myself into hell quickly turned into a trepidation of said hell, and a near-obsessive scouring the internet for other writers’ testaments from hell.

I started to understand why everyone who talks about the 3-day novel contest kind of talks about it like you’re sending yourself into the trenches and come out a changed person.

But what Dobie said that convinced me I had to do it was this: the contest is an exercise of getting out of your own way. You don’t have time to hum and haw and rewrite scenes and be a perfectionist. You barely have time to get words on the page, so they have to be whatever you can spit out on a dime. And I think that’s a lesson I need. As someone who will often rewrite the beginning about 10 times before I’m ready to move onto the middle, it might be good for me to uh not do that for once.

It’s also somewhat of a ‘write’ of passage. Is it masochistic to say that I’m just curious what kind of author I am when I’m forced into the flames? And once you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and you get a cute little certificate to hang on your wall. I kind of need to prove to myself that I can do it.

While Dobie is one of those insane authors that doesn’t plot out her three-day novels, I certainly will and have in fact already started. Without giving too much away, my novella takes place in a near-future dystopian Vancouver. It’s kind of The Electric State meets Mad Max meets current-day Vancouver, and it’s going to be awful and beautiful, I expect.

If you’re paying attention, the contest starts at the end of the month, so we have a few more weeks still to panic. After that, I’ll see you on the other side, inexplicably changed. Oh, and the code word is Picadillo so you know it is technically still me.