Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "some-noise"
Better yet, don't write that novel?
Dear Blog,
It is December. That means it is no longer November. And that means NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is over. There are thousands of new, very rough first drafts out there, about to be revised, or not.
Anyway, not everybody likes the idea of NaNoWriMo, and I have noticed, with my remarkable powers of Reading Stuff On The Internet, that some people can get quite cranky about other people doing stuff they think is dumb. For example! Laura Miller, whom I have enjoyed reading for years and whose reviews have led me to some of my favourite books (I will always be grateful to her for introducing me to Kelly Link – but more on Kelly Link another time!), was really cranky about NaNoWriMo in this article.
If you don’t feel like reading it, the title is “Better Yet, DON’T write that novel!” and the gist of it is, there are too many bad books, there are too many narcissistic, petulantly entitled bad writers, and there are not enough readers, and so, NaNoWriMo is a dumb idea. I’m paraphrasing. She puts it better, and more crankily, than that.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe in some cases writing is a narcissistic past-time (I’m becoming increasingly convinced that blogging is, anyway … no offense, blog), and it does suck that “people” don’t read much and the book industry is suffering and there is so much stuff out there, I mean SO MUCH, that even for an ardent reader, it’s impossible to read everything you want to read (which actually is sort of a nice problem if you ask me, which you didn’t, blog, I realize that), and having a book published feels a little bit like dropping a pebble into the ocean.
But.
First of all, writers and readers are not separate blocks of people. The article seems to portray would-be writers as a too-large, self-obsessed, and un-self-critical mob and the readers, noble but too few. I don’t know any writers, published or otherwise, who aren’t passionate readers. Writers are probably reading more books than anybody else.
And also.
Nobody has to do NaNoWriMo. If we were all required by law to sit down and write 50 000 words in the month of November, I would totally understand the griping about it. I might carry a NO NANOWRIMO placard myself and rant about the Obama administration thinking they can just force people to be novelists. But as it is, it’s something you can sign up for, or something you can ignore. If you think it sounds ridiculous, that’s fine, blog. You can go have a cup of coffee with Laura Miller and complain about how Everybody Thinks They Are A Writer These Days. If you do, tell her I love her articles. Usually.
So anyway. Now that it’s over, I am hereby declaring to The Internetz that I disagree with the brilliant and accomplished Laura Miller. I salute you, NaNoWriMo-ers! You’ve written your awful first drafts ridiculously fast, and they are done! Revise them! Then there will be some good books, and probably even more books that are still bad, and what is wrong with that? As someone who has written a few bad books myself, I am totally in favour of the practice.
You know what? I am kind of annoyed with myself for writing this, but I’m going to post it anyway, because my OC side wants me to put up an entry every week, all tidy-like. The thing with The Internetz is that it can sometimes feel like an echo chamber for a lot of belligerent ranting. I get overwhelmed sometimes by “the whole opinionated din” (to crib from Ani DiFranco, in Silence), and really, who cares what I think about what Laura Miller thinks about NaNoWriMo? I don’t even care, and I just wrote a whole blog post about it.
Clearly I need to get off-line for a bit.
Yours, irrelevantly,
Catherine
It is December. That means it is no longer November. And that means NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is over. There are thousands of new, very rough first drafts out there, about to be revised, or not.
Anyway, not everybody likes the idea of NaNoWriMo, and I have noticed, with my remarkable powers of Reading Stuff On The Internet, that some people can get quite cranky about other people doing stuff they think is dumb. For example! Laura Miller, whom I have enjoyed reading for years and whose reviews have led me to some of my favourite books (I will always be grateful to her for introducing me to Kelly Link – but more on Kelly Link another time!), was really cranky about NaNoWriMo in this article.
If you don’t feel like reading it, the title is “Better Yet, DON’T write that novel!” and the gist of it is, there are too many bad books, there are too many narcissistic, petulantly entitled bad writers, and there are not enough readers, and so, NaNoWriMo is a dumb idea. I’m paraphrasing. She puts it better, and more crankily, than that.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe in some cases writing is a narcissistic past-time (I’m becoming increasingly convinced that blogging is, anyway … no offense, blog), and it does suck that “people” don’t read much and the book industry is suffering and there is so much stuff out there, I mean SO MUCH, that even for an ardent reader, it’s impossible to read everything you want to read (which actually is sort of a nice problem if you ask me, which you didn’t, blog, I realize that), and having a book published feels a little bit like dropping a pebble into the ocean.
But.
First of all, writers and readers are not separate blocks of people. The article seems to portray would-be writers as a too-large, self-obsessed, and un-self-critical mob and the readers, noble but too few. I don’t know any writers, published or otherwise, who aren’t passionate readers. Writers are probably reading more books than anybody else.
And also.
Nobody has to do NaNoWriMo. If we were all required by law to sit down and write 50 000 words in the month of November, I would totally understand the griping about it. I might carry a NO NANOWRIMO placard myself and rant about the Obama administration thinking they can just force people to be novelists. But as it is, it’s something you can sign up for, or something you can ignore. If you think it sounds ridiculous, that’s fine, blog. You can go have a cup of coffee with Laura Miller and complain about how Everybody Thinks They Are A Writer These Days. If you do, tell her I love her articles. Usually.
So anyway. Now that it’s over, I am hereby declaring to The Internetz that I disagree with the brilliant and accomplished Laura Miller. I salute you, NaNoWriMo-ers! You’ve written your awful first drafts ridiculously fast, and they are done! Revise them! Then there will be some good books, and probably even more books that are still bad, and what is wrong with that? As someone who has written a few bad books myself, I am totally in favour of the practice.
You know what? I am kind of annoyed with myself for writing this, but I’m going to post it anyway, because my OC side wants me to put up an entry every week, all tidy-like. The thing with The Internetz is that it can sometimes feel like an echo chamber for a lot of belligerent ranting. I get overwhelmed sometimes by “the whole opinionated din” (to crib from Ani DiFranco, in Silence), and really, who cares what I think about what Laura Miller thinks about NaNoWriMo? I don’t even care, and I just wrote a whole blog post about it.
Clearly I need to get off-line for a bit.
Yours, irrelevantly,
Catherine
