Why NNWM: Permission to be bad
Part of the why NaNoWriMo is good for writers series.
NaNoWriMo says that it’s okay to write bad stuff. Loose plotting, awkward phrasing, weirdly-depicted characters, holey timelines: it’s all good, as long as you’re progressing your story and building up that lovely wordcount.
This is a sticking-point in some people’s opinions, and yes, it produces bad writing. No-one disputes that. The thing is: that’s one of the good things about NaNo.
Writers want their stories to be good. They want to share them, and want to make them the best stories they can be. This desire is good and to be encouraged, but it can also get in the way.
For some writers, this desire leads to getting stuck. Endlessly polishing the first chapter can be very tempting, but it’s also a trap that stops us from getting any further in the story. (It’s also pointless until you’ve written the whole story anyway, in most cases.)
For other writers, it stops them from ever starting. The pressure to make it the best it can be coupled with the weight of a blank page can halt a writer in their creative tracks before they’ve even started.
Having a space in which it’s okay for your writing to not be perfect, to give yourself permission to make mistakes and let them lie, is really important to some writers. It lets writers throw down a meaningless, trashy first sentence to break the seal on a blank page, so they can follow it up with more useful, story-progressing sentences. It enables them to blast past the rough bits and get through the meat of their story, even if it’s cooked unevenly. It lets them get to the end.
(As I said previously: the point of NaNoWriMo is not to write bad stories that should be immediately published. The point is to write whole stories, with the intention of going back and polishing later. They’re not supposed to stay bad writing! It’s just okay for them to start out as bad writing.)
As one author (whom I can’t remember) famously said: “I can edit a bad page, but I can’t edit a blank one.”
NaNoWriMo lets you make a lot of bad pages, from which you can edit awesome pages (if you so choose).
Coming soon: permission to focus on your writing.
