NaNoWriMo: Earning My Doctoral Degree in Literature!

After three years spent researching the subject of my new novel, I feel as though I put myself through grad school and completed a self-imposed “Master’s degree” on the subjects of Eastern European Jews, New York’s Lower East Side, and the immigrant experience in the year 1911.

If research was my “Master’s” then writing the novel is proving to be the Doctoral Dissertation!

 

Hester Street, New York's Lower East Side, around 1910

I WORK BEST on a deadline. Most creative types do! Give me an achievable goal for a passionate project with a fixed date to get it done, and I crank!!

NaNoWriMo is just the spark I needed to move my novel off the back burner to First Draft. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, invites authors to write an original novel of a minimum 50,000 words in just 30 days –  the month of November.

 

Today is Day 14, and I’ve written almost 29,000 words so far.

MY NOVEL BEGAN 10 years ago with a germ of an idea: “I wonder what happened to Tevye and the girls when they left Russia and came to America as immigrants?” Remember, at the end of Fiddler On the Roof? Tevye and his wife and two youngest daughters flee the pogroms (persecution) of Czarist Russia and head to America to live with Uncle Abram (only he doesn’t know it yet).

So what happens next?  Wish someone would write a sequel.

No one ever did.

So that someone turned out to be me!

All of us are sons and daughters of immigrants.  We all came from someplace else. So it’s a story whose roots are common to all of our family trees.

THAT IDEA LED to three years of research into the immigrant experience in America: Ellis Island, the Streets of Gold, the realities of the Lower East Side, poverty, disease, sweatshops and tenements. Educating myself on what the immigrants faced when they came to America.

I spent three years with as many as a hundred books checked out of the library – at the SAME time!

You might say I put myself through grad school and completed a self-imposed “Master’s degree” on the subjects of Eastern European immigrants, New York, and the immigrant experience in 1911.

NEXT, I LAUNCHED into the story treatment.  That was another year’s work. Weaving the main plot and crafting the trails of sub-plots and characters, scenes and settings.   Turns out there were more stories about Tevye the Dairyman, written over a century ago.  Stories that had never been adapted before.  After reading those stories, I decided to weave some of the original plot lines with my own and create a unique sequel.  My story begins five years after Fiddler ends,  with Ellis Island and the Lower East Side as a backdrop.

If research was my “Master’s Degree,” writing the novel is proving to be the Doctoral Dissertation!

the novel and sequel to "Fiddler On the Roof"

And that is quickly becoming the manuscript for Tevye and The Streets of Gold – the novel.  Thanks to NaNoWriMo, the first draft of my novel will be mostly finished by the end of November, and I hope to put the wraps on it by early 2010.  In fact, I’ve already begun the process of looking for an agent and a publisher.

I’m also planning a one-man show adaptation — Tevye! The One-Man Show — which I’ll be performing as the world’s most famous dairyman, starting sometime in 2010.

And a fully-staged musical will follow, most likely in 2011: Fiddler in America.

Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish writer and contemporary of Mark Twain, created Tevye.  Fiddler On The Roof, the acclaimed Broadway musical, immortalized him. And now, with my novel and subsequent stage production(s), the tradition continues… this time in America!

I’ll soon have my self-imposed Doctorate in Literature, resulting in the long-awaited sequel to Fiddler On The Roof.

If you were a rich man, you couldn’t buy a better story, a better character, or a better country for the setting: Fiddler in America!

You can follow progress at my website:  http://www.TheTevyeProject.com

Here at my blog:  http://kevinnorberg.wordpress.com

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/KevinNorberg

And at the NaNoWriMo site:  http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/553371

—Kevin Norberg (Tevye), author

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