NaNoWriMo and me!

J. M. F. Grant has something of a rant about NaNoWriMo. So I figured I'd weigh in about the phenom of National Novel Writing Month.

For those of you who don't know, and don't care to read their site, NaNoWriMo is a largely online event that gets people from all over the world, but mostly America, hehe, to spend a month writing a novel (for these purposes defined as any prose text 50,000 words or longer, which is more likely a novella than a novel, but, hey, what the hell, right?). What NaNoWriMo attempts to get people to do is write. I first read this in an essay by Ray Bradbury, and as I've gone on I've increasingly realized it's truth, that an author's greatest barrier is their critique - many people don't think they're good enough to write a novel, or publish one, or whatever, so they don't give it an attempt.

So, in that vein, I'm a fairly large supporter of the concept of NaNoWriMo. But, to be honest, when you read their statement of intent it's . . . pretty awful. They say stuff like, "Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft . . . It's all about quantity, not quality." Ouch. If that doesn't sound sufficiently like inveigling against "painstaking craft" here's another little bit, "To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."

On, that's the context of Grant's rant. He has, apparently, published several books (he did not say if they were novels) and he seems offended that there's this program that gets people to do what they do at the expense of what he does - that planning and craft is somehow a . . . barrier to writing a novel, instead of a way to write a better novel. And I have some sympathy for this. I also fall fairly strongly into the pain-staking craft department. Both Condotierri and Simon Peter are about BIG, IMPORTANT things, and I want to say a variety of things and use the medium of a novel to do that. In some ways it's difficult to even say how long it took to write them, because they both arose from years of thought about social, technological and theological issues. In many ways, they are the culmination of everything I've learned since I was ten years old and wrote my first story, and I'm guessing my next novel will also be all that . . . with the greater knowledge and experience I've gained writing my first two novels.

One of the other things that NaNoWriMo says and this is . . . this is terrible, because it's very much a lie, is that writing the first draft is "the hard part". In some ways, for me at least, finishing Condotierri was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I was nearing the end and I realized that, right here, right now, I've got to make the previous 100,000 words make sense. All lose ends must be tied off, all conflicts resolved, it's got to end. In other ways, that was also immensely satisfying. As opposed to re-writing and editing? I'd rather end a novel every day of the week than edit, hehe. Editing isn't hard, mostly, but it is deeply dull. It's easy to keep energetic about the creativity of the first draft. But the second time through? Well, that's satisfying because you can do it and go, "Yeah, this came out pretty cool." The third time? It's just boring. The fifth time? You want to die.

But even that isn't the hardest thing. Because, after that, there's seeking publication. Which is where you beg people you don't know to deign to publish your book, using standards that are designed to weed out 999 in 1000 manuscripts. The odds are wicked stacked against you, you have no clear way of knowing what they're looking for any given day (or even if they're looking for anything at all), you have no way of knowing what magical combination of words will catch the eye of a publisher. (Indeed, the mood of the publisher, agent, editor, etc., is probably a bigger factor than anything you can write; whether they liked they lunch or not is probably a bigger factor than the objective quality of your work once it has reached the stage of being polished.) And then there's the deep and abiding pleasure of getting the FOAD letters, those politely, and distantly, worded rejections to your life's work.

Compared to all that? Writing the first draft is easy. And fun. It's all creative. After that? It becomes a slog through work you're already over-familiar with, and then the walk of shame that is getting published. The way that NaNoWriMo gets around this is by . . . don't mention doing that! Say that they're done writing the first draft, which is like saying that the food is read after the reaping is done. There's still a long way to go between "first draft" and "completed work".

So, while I understand why someone might be bothered by the cavalier attitude that NaNoWriMo evinces for the ideas of painstaking craft in writing, at the same time it's pretty clear their tongue is in their cheek in the first case, and in the second they're trying to get people to write. Where I have trouble with the project is that they encourage people to stop immediately after the first draft but nevertheless encourage people who are successful to call themselves novelists. Which is akin to running a mile and calling yourself a marathoner. A first draft is a necessary condition for being a novelist, but it is far from a sufficient condition. There's definitely more to it! And NaNoWriMo wholly ignores these other things, handwaving them away as merely devotion to craft and foolishness other writers do.

So, I guess I'm somewhat ambivalent about NaNoWriMo, hehe. But that's the extent of my thoughts on it.