Why NaNoWriMo Is a Bad Idea
Look, this post is going to read like a humble brag but it’s not. It’s a discussion of why, from someone who does this as a full time job, treating writing a novel as some sort of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire-type challenge is dooming your book to failure. Your book, which under normal circumstances might be really good. And you, yourself. Who under normal circumstances–if you allowed yourself to give yourself the proper encouragement–might be a truly outstanding novelist. If you went about things the right way.
Because yes, how you approach a project matters. People ask me all the time about my sources of inspiration, writing schedule, etc. And, 95% of the time, their response to what I tell them is the same: some version of wow, you treat this like a job. And why yes I do. As it is, in fact, my job. But, more importantly, for writing to have become my job I had to start treating it like my job long before it actually was. Books, contrary to popular belief, don’t write themselves; and they aren’t written by the sort of “I’m not inspired right now”-type magical thinking in which we all, including me, sometimes allow ourselves to engage. They’re written by hard work. The same hard work, according to the same schedule, day after day.
That’s the unsexy truth…that NaNoWriMo discourages you from considering.
I, as I love to point out, had to write over 800,000 words of crap before I wrote anything I thought was even remotely good enough to publish. My husband, meanwhile, just sat down and wrote a book. Neither of which happened in a month. My approach took a couple of years; his took about six months. But both were built on a lifetime of writing. Richard Laymon was once asked, how long does it take to write a book? His response was: “Twenty-five years and six months. Six months to produce a manuscript, and twenty-five years to learn how to write.” I was about twenty-five when I finished my first book and I can tell you, I still don’t think I know how to write. Mr. Laymon, who I was pleased to count as a mentor from my so-called “real” life and who is now sadly lost to us, operated on a steeper learning curve than most.
My advice (doled out in long-form in I Look Like This Because I’m a Writer) is to approach writing like you would running: a little at a time, recognizing that by starting you’re at least flirting with the idea of a lifelong commitment. No one wakes up one morning and just starts writing a 500, 1,000, or more words per day of quality prose without training. Sure, maybe, when inspiration strikes, but six days a week? Being able to summon the muse on command is a skill that takes years to develop. Years of hard work. Because daydreaming about writing doesn’t prepare one to successfully complete a novel any more than daydreaming about running qualifies one for the Boston Marathon.
The comment I’ve made on Facebook, which has really ticked some people off, is that writing only 1,600 words per day (about what you have to do, to complete NaNoWriMo) sounds like a vacation. I typically shoot for twice that and, while I was wrapping up work on The Black Prince, I was writing to deadline so I was averaging close to 4,000. Seven days per week. And people felt like I was humble bragging, and I get that; but the truth is that this is my job, it took a long time for it to become my job (read: year after year of failure), and I should really be doing something all day. I’m not sure why it’s “bragging” to say, I work hard at my writing job when it was never bragging, before, to say I worked hard as an attorney, but there you go. When it comes to the arts, there’s a whole lot of magical thinking going on. And a whole, whole lot of ego.
I do the equivalent of a NaNoWriMo every month. Now. But when I first decided to pursue this whole writing thing, really struggled to get anything onto the page. Or, I might have a good writing day one day and be so exhausted from that that I couldn’t even string two words together for the next three days. Getting teeth pulled, in comparison, would have seemed like a joy.
The difference between me then and me now is that I kept at it. I make no promises about the quality of my writing–opinions on that certainly vary!–but the role of hard work in developing any talent simply cannot be overstated. No one gets successful at anything, because they woke up one morning and tried it on a whim. A career–again, in anything–is not pickup baseball.
NaNoWriMo is to writing, therefore, what one really spectacular gym day is to weight loss. Or what run-walking around the block is to training for the Boston Marathon. A really good start. Yes. Start. I mean, I suppose a person theoretically could confine their weight loss attempts to a month, or their marathon training attempts to a month, and they might even get somewhere. But it’d be by wrecking their body. Moreover, simply by their very nature, whatever gains they made, and however impressive those gains seemed, they wouldn’t be lasting. And isn’t the point, with any training, lasting gains?
A foundation upon which to build true, lasting success?
ILLT is my least successful book, probably at least in part because books on the actual craft of writing don’t sell that well. Books on how to become a famous author in a month do. No one wants to hear long, boring lectures filled with sports analogies (so if you’re still reading this, congratulations). And honestly, my biggest beef with NaNoWriMo is that it encourages the very sort of gimmicky approach–based on more of the same magical thinking that seems so prevalent in our industry–responsible for so many writing failures.
Failures that didn’t have to happen but that were engineered, at least in part, by unrealistic expectations.
Which is what this comes down to: I am not trying to discourage you. I want you to succeed, whether you follow my advice or no, or think I’m an idiot or no. Whether you, the reader, are secretly the next James Joyce has nothing to do with whether NaNoWriMo is the best means of you discovering your talent. Which I’m sure you have. “Write a novel in a month” is a completely unrealistic expectation, for anyone. Write fifty thousand words of a larger project, which has previously been outlined and will later, after completion, be thoroughly edited? Maybe. After years of practice. Or not ever, if you turn out to be one of the many brilliant writers out there who takes a year or more to produce a manuscript.
Moreover, who says you need to wait for November? Writing isn’t something you “just pick up,” and it certainly isn’t something you do for one month out of the year. Writing, like anything you want to get good at–and certainly make even a partial living from–is a daily commitment.
Success doesn’t come from throwing all your other commitments out the window and subsisting on nothing but coffee and Skittles while you type furiously into the wee hours. You may have 50,000 words of–something–at the end but what’s the point? What have you actually gained? Are you really better off than you were, before? Has your life–you know, your real life, full of family and friends and hobbies–been enriched? Are your relationships stronger, and deeper?
Let me know your thoughts, along with your own experiences, both positive and negative, with NaNoWriMo, in the comments.
