Pat Dobie is a two-time winner of the three-day novel contest, and she’s ready to spill her secrets to success
Gates Annai (she/they) // Literature Editor
Andrei Gueco (he/himself ) // Illustrator
It was the start of Labour Day long weekend, 1988, and a young UBC word processing operator locked herself in a room at work on a Saturday. While the rest of Canada attended barbeques and other students celebrated their last weekend of freedom before the school year, Pat Dobie wrote her first ever novella in a tight 72 hours—and would go on to win the eleventh annual three-day novel contest with her novel Pawn to Queen.
Every Labour Day long weekend since 1977, writers from across Canada and the U.S. take to their desks, shut off their phones, and race against their imaginations and the ever-ticking 72 hour clock in order to produce a novel by 11:59 p.m. Monday night. Sprung from a bar in Vancouver among a group of proud literary geniuses, the three-day novel contest has since grown to attract hundreds of writers to this ‘write’ of passage each year.
The rules are simple: write your novel in any method, location or topic you want, but other than a short outline beforehand, the writing must begin no earlier than 12:01 a.m. on the Saturday of the long weekend, and must stop by 11:59 p.m. on the Monday. No editing in the days afterwards. No sitting on your manuscript for weeks or months. As Dobie says, “It is what it is… you get to send it in and you don’t have to think about it again.”
After winning in 1988, Dobie returned to the challenge in 2016, and is no stranger to the shortlist. Every year, she follows more or less the same structure. “The thing I try to do is create a frictionless environment… there’s nothing I want to do except the contest,” she says—even a month out she’s already thinking about what she’s going to eat to prevent lines at the grocery store, getting stuck in traffic or spending too much time doing just about anything other than putting words on the page. “I never outline,” she adds, “I always think I’m going to and then Friday’s over and I’m like, ‘Oh no, I didn’t even backup my laptop—I haven’t gone grocery shopping.’ It’s like a panic every year.”
Day one, Dobie sleeps past the midnight starting line and wakes up around 6 or 7 a.m. to actually begin. Armed with a log to track her word count, start and end time, food and breaks and a stack of blank index cards, she sits down with a coffee, “and then I panic, because I don’t know what I’m going to write about,” she says. To overcome the blank page, Dobie begins by freewriting—getting words and scenes down on the page until she isn’t sure what will happen next. That’s where the index cards come in handy, which she uses to brainstorm every possible direction the story could take next. “If you get out of the way, and you have some kind of understanding on how to tell a story—and I believe everyone does—then it will come out,” Dobie adds.
Day two is the same, “but I’m usually panicking harder,” Dobie laughs, adding that day two is usually when people start to disappear. While her goal for the first day is ten thousand words, she notes she usually ends at around eight thousand and starts day two already feeling behind. But before you know it, day three begins, and with it, the sprint to the end. While many writers who regularly attempt the contest give themselves at least four hours to edit, Dobie prefers to give herself one—just enough to skim her work, give it a quick edit, add chapter breaks and then write the ending. Her endings can range from half a page to a whole additional scene, depending on her inspiration and energy. “Usually I’m burnt by that point and I just don’t have it in me,” she says. “Everything else I write I edit like a bastard and I just don’t like it… it’s so freeing [not to edit]—it reminds me it is supposed to be fun.” After appearing on the shortlist for 2018 and earning an honourable mention in 2020, Dobie won first place again with her novella The Tenants in 2022. The novel follows three characters—a couple, Scott and Dave, and Maeve, the newcomer to their Vancouver neighbourhood. Maeve wears a tweed suit and lavender Crocs, and lives in a tent in the vacant lot down the road.
The novel explores themes of isolation and disconnect, and just how easy it is to be unhoused in Vancouver. “That’s the risk in Vancouver… You’re only a couple paychecks away from living in your car, or a shelter. Really, it’s not set up for the working class,” Dobie says.
For those looking to try the three-day novel challenge themselves, Dobie says, “I could not recommend it enough.” She adds that it is not uncommon for novice writers to win the contest, that if you’re a reader, you know instinctively how to tell a story, and you have every ability to tell it well. Even if you only have 72 hours to do it.
Her top ten list of tips for surviving the contest are:
- Save $5 on the early bird fee. Deadline is July 31st every year
- Work on your typing speed
- Make your environment as frictionless as possible
- Ideas can come from the thing that’s bugging you, the concept that’s not big enough for a novel, or a short story that blossoms into something more throughout the weekend.
- Discourage other people from interacting with you
- Get a ‘touchstone book,’ a story you can turn to at any point for inspiration, or some other tricks for getting yourself out of ruts.
- Lean into the restriction of the contest—adding even more restrictions can actually help ideas come.
- Hydrate, sleep, get up and walk around and find a way to record your ideas when you go out for a walk
- Join the contest Discord (linked on her site) to write alongside a community of enthusiastic (masochistic?) writers!
- Take the Tuesday afterwards off if you can, or take it easy if you can’t. The weekend will be taxing.
Grab a copy of The Tenants from Anvil Press ($18) or check out Pat Dobie’s website.