Every year, over the Labour Day Weekend, Vancouver’s Anvil Press superintends a Three-Day Novel-Writing Contest, an impossible-sounding competition that has evolved into a kind of Canadian literary institution. The title is accurate: contestants really are expected to write the entire thing over the course of a long weekend, and the quality of the results can surprise. There seems to be something about that ridiculous deadline that frees a writer’s imagination. The possibility of rewriting is closed off, and the writers are forced to trust themselves and follow through on all their initial instincts.

It’s a little bit disappointing, then, to see that the premise of this year’s winning novel, Loree Harrell’s Body Speaking Words, involves a woman who tries to write something for the Three-Day Novel-Writing Contest. (I would have supposed Anvil Press sees a dozen entries with this gimmick every year.) And whereas I imagine most writers enter the contest as a kind of lark, the unnamed narrator of Harrell’s book regards the contest as a grim rite of passage.

She’s obsessive about writing: the urge to put words down on paper is practically engraved into her DNA. She couldn’t stop if she tried, but she questions her own talent, and Harrell is very perceptive about the way would-be writers never are sure if they’re true artists or nothing more than saps and losers. Over the course of the three days, the narrator recalls stories from her own childhood, from her grandmother’s past, from her friend Mat; and through it all, she agonizes over her own novel and writhes in the throes of artistic creation.

Actually, Harrell makes the process seem a lot more hellish than it really is (I’ve entered the contest a couple of times myself, and was pretty relaxed – once, I had time not just to write a novel, but to read one as well). The novel is more effective, and calmer, in its flashback scenes – including the narrator’s painful memories of being a plain young girl with a pretty friend, and playing strip poker in the garage – and the extracts from her grandmother’s diaries recalling life in small-town South Dakota, with women going insane all around her for want of anything else to do with their minds.

“Structure’s not my very best thing,” Harrell’s narrator admits near the end of the novel. True enough: and I’m not sure if the novel’s thesis – about the human necessity to tell stories as a way of understanding our lives – is ever clearly made out, either. But I think Body Speaking Words will still strongly appeal to struggling authors. Harrell knows that for a lot of us, simply being able to finish a piece of writing is an act of heroism.