And so everyone gets together and has big rolling party. A party in which the weirdest ideas become indistinguishable from truth. A party where the shifting consensus many of us work to maintain is just shredded and replaced by a maelstrom of wild supposition. A party whose attendees sometimes resemble the adherents of a strange cult. A party in which reality is kept at bay by self-reinforcing rallies and mail outs and sheer bloody-mindedness. Let’s call it a tea party.
No, not a Tea Party. How about NaNoWriMo? Unlike the Tea Party movement’s adherents, NaNoers aren’t seeking to concoct a political vision from half-baked ideas and patent falsehoods. Just a novel. Just a few hundred thousand novels, in fact.
NaNoWriMo is big enough a juggernaut to ride on through the month without worrying about the doubts that mottle its fenders. Though this hasn’t stopped some supporters from taking criticism badly. Very badly.
I must admit to being a little conflicted about this. I can see valid points on both sides of this argument. Let’s review the charge sheet. Critics make some of these points.
- NaNoWriMo encourages people to write one month out of twelve. Whereas writing is a commitment, a twelve month affair.
- It gives people the impression that a month is long enough to write a novel.
- It emphasizes the suppression of the inner editor at the expense of revision, editing, and rewriting.
- It incites people to clog up the publishing industry with bad, half-baked work.
- It proudly embraces quantity at the expense of quality.
Now this is all true to a greater or lesser extent. The official NaNo ethos is proudly amateur. It’s a have-a-go philosophy that has little to say about what you do next with your first draft. In the past it has even promoted the confusion by offering participants promotional access to a service that will format, print and bind NaNo novels.
I find this occasionally frustrating. The organization behind NaNoWriMo, The Office of Letters and Light, is in a unique position. It can justifiably claim to be a thought leader for new writers. Having led thousands of writers to the keyboard, they could perhaps do more to help with the inevitable frustration that many feel when November’s hard work turns to dust in December. Perhaps, as the critics argue, many talented potential writers simply give up at that point, and hold on for another twelve months only to make the same mistakes all over again. I wish OLL didn’t go so quiet in December. I wish they built on the amazing momentum they build up every November. They could do this themselves, or perhaps partner up with other organizations to provide ongoing education and support. Their infrastructure could be used to create year round writers’ groups, for example.
But if they won’t do this, they won’t. Potential misconceptions notwithstanding, NaNoWriMo has done a lot of good come December 1, and you can’t blame them for not going on and doing another good thing that’s beyond their remit. Perhaps that’s down to other people. Perhaps that’s down to us.
NaNoWriMo remains a Good Thing. The Office of Letters and Light doesn’t have a moral responsibility to make year round writers out of its participants, but it certainly doesn’t discourage people from building on their work. Here are some bullet points from the case for the defence:
- NaNoWriMo encourages people to write, and to make stories.
- Thanks to the encouragement of other participants, and to its resources and pep talks, writers achieve feats they may otherwise have not even attempted.
- If some people put away their pens at the end of the month, others become year round writers.
- For some people NaNoWriMo is an end in itself, a standalone achievement that’s impressive in its own right.
- Many seasoned writers use NaNoWriMo energy to churn out first drafts which they then work on for months or years afterwards.
- It raises the profile of writing, gets people talking, meeting up, thinking about it. You’ve got to love that, right?
