Why NaNoWriMo Is Nobody's Friend

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Every year, about two weeks before Halloween, people start talking about NaNoWriMo. They began mentioning possible ideas, blog about their plans, start threads on message boards to meet other participants, start asking if others plan to give it a go this year, and generally behaving as though this is a great, fun game. In fact, the concept of writing a novel as a game is so interwoven in this month that there are "winners" and "losers." What do you have to do to win? Finish 50,000 words, of course! That's it. That's all. It actually seems like a rather harmless activity. One that I shouldn't have any issue with. It keeps people occupied and happy and hell, I'm always posting encouragement to writers. I love helping new writers--I'm a writing teacher for God's sake! But I hate NaNoWriMo, and I'll tell you why.

  1. Winners and losers. "Did you win NaNoWriMo?" "Oh, I didn't win last year, but I'm trying again this year! And I think I can do it!" Yeah, right, whatever. Look people, writing isn't a game. There aren't winners. There aren't losers. This isn't baseball or Rock Band or Monopoly. When I finish a book, I'm excited, but I don't run around the house screaming, "I won! I won! I won!" For the people who actually finish NaNoWriMo, being designated a "winner" can be very emotionally satisfying. But for the people who don't make it? Maybe it's just the teacher in me, but it makes me shudder to assign a loaded term like "loser" to a participant who did not reach an arbitrarily stopping point that's not even novel-length anyway. Words have meaning, people!
  2. Did I mention that 50,000 words isn't novel length? Because it's not. Unless you're writing something like Young Adult, Middle Grade, or a Harlequin Presents Romance. You might feel all warm and fuzzy for having written 50,000 words, but you have not completed a novel by any definition of the word. At most, you've written a novella. Again, words have meaning, people!
  3. It's nice to say that writing a novel is no more than putting your butt in the chair, putting words on paper, and working. In fact, get your ass in the chair and get to work is about the best advice you can ever give a writer. But there's more to writing than that. In fact, the famous (so very true) saying is "Writing is rewriting." Those initial 50,000 words might be satisfying, but they're at most a first step, while participants (encouraged by the very language the organizers use) seem to believe it's the last step. Just look at this:
    Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. What? What? What? You know what really bothers me about this horse shit? A lot of professions and hobbies require time and effort. I don't want to invest the time and effort into learning how to play a guitar, so I channel my Rock God desires into playing Rock Band Beatles. But I don't play 2 hours a day, every day, for a month and them claim that I've learned how to play the guitar Which is essentially what NaNoWriMo is doing.
  4. Why are we doing this? I don't have the answer, but the people at NaNoWriMo do! The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. Why would you want to do anything without being concerned with quality? To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. Don't do this. You're not special, neat, or clever if you participate in NaNoWriMo. And I honestly can't tell if that sentence was written as a joke. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work. There's a reason that they are professional authors and you are declaring yourself a "winner" for reaching an arbitrary goal (50,000 words of crap) that nobody cares about except you. And that is, while they're "dawdling" they're actually rewriting, revising, rethinking, tinkering, and searching for the perfect word, the perfect moment, the perfect ending. But anyway, I'm not even one of the people you would mock for "dawdling." Every month is NaNoWriMo for me--because I need to eat and I'm a professional writer.

You want to write? You have an idea for a novel? You think it would be fun to test yourself and set a goal to finish so many words in so many days? Then just fucking do it. Don't wait until November. Don't casually drop the fact that you're writing into daily conversations. Don't have a word count meter on your blog or announce it on your Twitter. And for the love of God, don't start submitting your novel(la) when you're finished. Agents don't want to see it and neither do publishers. If you absolutely MUST "participate" in this, at least use December as National Revise a Novel Month and January as National Let the Novel Sit For a Month and February as National Rewrite a Novel Month and March as National Get a Goddamned Beta Month and then maybe, maybe, April can be National Research a Good Agent For Your Project month.

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Comments

Are those quotes about reasons for being involved in NaNoWriMo for real? How horrible and insulting to professional authors!

I think there are some valuable lessons in NaNoWriMo for a hopeful writer, but they aren't the ones that are typically referenced:
  • The ability to make a deadline. You need 2,800 words by the end of the day to make your quota? You're running behind and are going to have to do an extra 10,000 words this week, somehow, between working your day job, taking the kids to school, going to the dentist and shopping for Thanksgiving? This is what it means to be a writer. It is a job, just like anything else. It takes time. It takes effort. Spending a month having to write a certain amount every day just to keep your head afloat is what a "real" writer experiences every month.
  • Writing even when you don't feel like it. It's not about your artistic integrity. It's not about your muses. It's about getting those damned words down on paper already.
  • Gaining experience. The more you write crap--and if you do NaNoWriMo you're likely going to write crap--the more you learn how to not write crap. Writing is like any other skill. The more you do it, the more you practice, the better you understand it.

If you're writing for pleasure and want to self-publish your story about Neelox the Snickerslayer, then maybe NaNoWriMo can be your big jumpstart every year.

Otherwise, it's not much good other than practice and it may not even be the kind of practice you need. I tried it for two years in a row and found it to be pretty much pointless. I could write 50,000 words in a weekend, but they weren't good words.

I feel better. Thanks pepperlandgirl.

I've been writing and revising my novel off and on for the last 5 or 6 years and I look at contests like this and have wondered what might be wrong with me since I don't set myself a number of words per day goal and I write only when I'm inspired. (and I write in run on sentences)

I'm stuck at a transitional point and I have to work it out. I've done at least 10 rewrites for this section, but it has to feel right to me.

Quote Originally posted by jali View post
I feel better. Thanks pepperlandgirl.

I've been writing and revising my novel off and on for the last 5 or 6 years and I look at contests like this and have wondered what might be wrong with me since I don't set myself a number of words per day goal and I write only when I'm inspired. (and I write in run on sentences)

I'm stuck at a transitional point and I have to work it out. I've done at least 10 rewrites for this section, but it has to feel right to me.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, so I'm glad pepper's article made you feel better!

For some people, it's good practice. Other people, it's not. It's certainly not the way everyone writes, or should write.

I've thought about it some more and I think I figured out what really bothers me. The novel, as a genre and as an art form, is a complicated, beautiful, nuanced, sometimes sublime, form of expression. When you take a novel and you strip it down to nothing more than its word count, it devalues the genre. It literally takes away everything that makes the novel valuable, that gives it worth. It takes away everything that makes it worthwhile. It's not an accomplishment to write 50,000 crappy words. It's a huge accomplishment to write 50,000 words that you are proud of. I wish that NaNo was more about that pride than it is pure quantity.

I've tried NaNo twice, and all it ever did was make me feel like a failure. I think I write well, but I certainly don't write fast. And the further I got behind the necessary keeping-up word count, the more discouraged I got, which tended to put me off writing all together for prolonged chunks of time.

Also, the whole atmosphere around NaNo is this obnoxious "I'm OK, you're OK, we're all special snowflakes who write NOVELS" thing. Which, no. Half of the of the participators I knew wrote frigging fan fiction.

Quote Originally posted by Orual View post
I've tried NaNo twice, and all it ever did was make me feel like a failure. I think I write well, but I certainly don't write fast. And the further I got behind the necessary keeping-up word count, the more discouraged I got, which tended to put me off writing all together for prolonged chunks of time.
Yeah, I think that's a major problem with the whole situation. Some people thrive under pressure and require a deadline. Others just feel the pressure a little too much and get discouraged and then give up. Which means that the whole concept has failed you in more ways than one.
Also, the whole atmosphere around NaNo is this obnoxious "I'm OK, you're OK, we're all special snowflakes who write NOVELS" thing. Which, no. Half of the of the participators I knew wrote frigging fan fiction.
I've noticed this sentiment come up a lot on this board--that there's writing and then there's fanfic. Now, I'm not going to designate myself the defender of all things fandom or anything, but I write fanfic and I have been for the past decade. It hasn't harmed my career in any way, and in fact, has helped in more ways than I could name.

Okay then, devil's advocate moment: pepper, would you say that writing a 50,000 word fanfic in a month could be helpful for a writer?

Quote Originally posted by Zuul View post
Okay then, devil's advocate moment: pepper, would you say that writing a 50,000 word fanfic in a month could be helpful for a writer?
Depends on the person. But here's the thing. Everybody needs to write about 1 million words of crap. You just need to get it out of your system. When you write, you're teaching yourself how to write. You're working out your tone, your voice, your style. You're working out if you like 3rd person or 1st person POV, if you're attracted to internal or external conflict, if you have a special problem with commas, if your sentences are coherent. All of that good, hard stuff.

Writing fanfic is a fun, low-stress activity that, I think, provides a certain amount of satisfaction to the author even without posting it for all the world to see. If somebody told me they're going to work on plot by writing a Star Trek fanfic (because they want to teach themselves how to plot), I would completely and utterly support that and find it much less off-putting then "I'M GOING TO WRITE A WHOLE NOVEL! WOO!"

Alright, well. I can't say that I am completely without appreciation for fanfic. I have dabbled in that area myself. I just know people who are good writers, and they've given up on their original creative works and turned entirely to fanfic (I think because they can get such immediate and overwhelmingly positive feedback). And so I feel like they've done themselves a disservice, and end up irked at the genre.

Which isn't terribly pertinent to the whole NaNoWriMo thing, so I probably should've removed the slam. Sorry.

Quote Originally posted by Orual View post
Alright, well. I can't say that I am completely without appreciation for fanfic. I have dabbled in that area myself. I just know people who are good writers, and they've given up on their original creative works and turned entirely to fanfic (I think because they can get such immediate and overwhelmingly positive feedback). And so I feel like they've done themselves a disservice, and end up irked at the genre.
I'm going to continue the hijack for a moment to say that is definitely a seductive trap. LIfe is so easy with fanfic. You write it, and if it's great or even if it's not great, you get positive feedback and people love you and you're validated as an author and a human being. I fully believe most people write for love--not for love of the craft but so they can be loved.