NaNoWriMo :: A waste of enthusiasm?

I am not a NaNoWriMo participant this year, but I've been there and thrown fifty thousand words at a wall to see what sticks.  So I'm re-posting this post from last year as a preemptive strike against the naysayers and the nattering nabobs of NaNo negativity. 

Every year, someone whines that the participants are somehow wasting their time.

I disagree...

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I've been known to answer the "What do you do?" question with "I drink coffee and make stuff up".  My favorite response thus far was just the other day when a guy said "So you're in politics then?"

Enthusiasm can be created, it can be encouraged, it can be diminished, and it even can be destroyed. But it is rarely ever wasted.
Writing a novel is more than a profession.  I once said that a writer is "society's designated dreamer" and I stand by that.  (Try putting that on your tax return.)  At the risk of getting too airy-fairy on you, it's a mindset.  For my money, a writer is a conspirator in the great and secret game of words, broker in the exchange of ideas.  And as far as I'm concerned, everyone is welcome to roll up their sleeves and join us.
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UPDATE! The Los Angeles Times book blog "Jacket Copy" has come out with a point-by-point refutation of Miller's piece in Salon. Worth the read.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/11/12-reasons-to-ignore-the-naysayers-do-nanowrimo.html
 

For some reason I was thinking about this exchange when I read this Op/Ed published by Salon.com that tells us that we should knock it off.  NaNoWriMo is apparently a colossal waste of time and enthusiasm.  Why?  Because by focusing on writing, we are apparently drawing too much attention away from reading and we're supposedly encouraging people to create stuff that won't be published.

It occurs to me to wonder what Laura Miller, the author of that piece would say if I asked her to define what makes a writer.  If I asked her who does have her permission to write a novel.

Based upon a few interactions with NaNoers, Miller draws some remarkably broad conclusions about who is participating and what effect it has upon their reading habits.  I would like to emphasize that at no point does she present any actual data to back up her thesis that when people are encouraged to write, they'll stop reading.

I read.  I write.  All the writers I know who write came to it because they like to read.  As I type this, I'm quite literally sitting in a personal home library packed with thousands of books.  The notion that encouraging writing will curtail reading is preposterous.

In fact, after spending decades writing, reading and running bookstores, I must say that I've never met anyone serious about writing who doesn't also read voraciously.  We do read a little less when we're writing, but as Lev Grossman recently discussed, writers are actually given to reading and re-reading not just what we write, but the things we enjoy and the authors we want to emulate.  Despite the anecdotes presented as evidence in the Salon piece, how many people have you really met that sit down to write a book but don't actually like reading them?

Seriously?

The piece includes the curious argument that encouraging amateur novelists hurts the sales of fiction because writing books sell well.  In the case of one literary magazine that she mentioned, they sell well enough that they pay for the publication of the literary magazine. I take it we're supposed to take that as a bad thing because we wouldn't want dangerous advice espoused in those writing books to get out into the world and encourage these dangerous fools...

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."  
-Stephen King On Writing, a Memoir of the Craft

And while I haven't read every writing book in existence, I used to sell them so I've read a lot of them and every one I have read includes this same exhortation to read widely.

That sort of madness must be stopped at all costs. 

The hard truth of the matter is that on one level, Miller is correct: the great bulk of what we create during NaNoWriMo is not publishable fiction by any means.  It is, at best, a first draft.  A first draft that must be subjected to repeated revisions and subsequent drafts in order to create something that's worth the time of a publisher or agent.  The organizers warn participants about this and every year, some of them ignore the advice.

Publishers and agents alike have repeatedly told me that NaNoWriMo causes their in-boxes to swell with things that they can't sell, aren't finished and aren't good.  (So do writing conferences, incidentally) Many of them spend the month of December digging their way out of the blizzard of hopeful 50,000 word mini-novels.  I'm sure that several great books get overlooked every year because they're lost in the storm.

That's really too bad, but frankly, that's the way it goes.

I feel a bit sorry for the people shifting that slush pile and wish them well, but agents knew that was part of the gig when they went out for the team.  I'm actually curious if the incidence of this is really that much greater among NaNoWriMo participants than the rest of the people who throw unpublishable pap over the transom or if it's just concentrated in a single month so it draws attention.

So, with not a mote more or less proof of my assertion than Miller, I tell you that the assertion that reading and writing are hindering one another is ludicrous in the extreme.  Her wish that we did more to encourage reading and discovering new authors is laudable.  Her reasoning that NaNoWriMo is hindering that effort is just silly.

So who is a real writer and who has Laura Miller's permission to write a book?  The people who don't give a damn what she thinks.  Frankly, if her snark is enough to get you to walk away from the keyboard, then good riddance to you because if you can't handle someone telling you that what you're doing is silly or pointless or crap then you're not ready to be a professional writer.

"It's impossible to discourage the real writers, they don't give a damn what you think, they're going to write."
- Sinclair Lewis 

 

The Total Perspective Vortex

This morning, my mother called to remind me that today was Make a Difference Day.

I'd never heard of that, so I got online and looked it up.

As cynical as my initial knee-jerk reaction to the National Day of Insert-Cause-of-Your-Choice-Here might be, there's something to be said for having a reminder pop up now and then not to get so self-involved that I forget that there are other people in the world and that the things I do have an impact upon them.

Alas, there's no ribbon for that.

In Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams introduced a device called "The Total Perspective Vortex". In his story, it was invented by a scientist whose wife badgered him about having a sense of perspective. So he took a piece of cake, extrapolated the entirety of creation from it (like you do) and on a microscopic point resting atop a microscopic point, he placed a sign that said "You Are Here". And seeing one's insignificance in relation to the whole of "one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation" was enough to destroy your mind.

And comedy hijinks ensue.

All beings, Adams reasoned, constantly divide themselves into smaller groups in an effort to fight the enormity of it all.

I've recently read a few blog posts by cancer survivors railing against the practice of wearing pink ribbons or the curious practice of Facebook status memes meant to raise awareness.

And to be honest, the Facebook thing annoys me too.

The number of people in my life who have either beaten or succumbed to cancer isn't something I care to dwell upon very often. It's just too... big. When it jumps out at me, it overshadows everything else and I can't think of anything else. I'm just a microscopic point on a microscopic point holding a sign: "I am here."

Those damn Facebook posts do that too me every time. And I remain like that until I've managed to write my way out of it, push it back with a phalanx of giant robots until it is sequestered once more in my mental basement, where it will lurk under the stairs until the next time it reaches out to grab my ankle.

But that's not the fault of the person I saw wearing a pink ribbon or even the person who cut and pasted a status meme onto their Facebook wall.

Adams reasoned that our minds cannot cope with how small we are in terms of the bigger picture. That if we were forced to confront the impunity with which the world moves regardless of our individual whims, we couldn't handle it.

He's both right and wrong. Right in that we do indeed constantly retreat from the enormity of the world without and wrong insomuch as we can take it. In small doses.

And maybe that's the value of these commemorative days. It's certainly why I have a special place in my heart for this one.

Make a Difference Day. Nothing telling you what to do or how to do it or who to do it for. Just make a difference. A positive one.

Lately, I've been working with an organization called "FindAnHour.org" which is a mentoring drive in the Tacoma area. The site acts as a clearing house for agencies and volunteer organizations ranging from the write@253 writing center where I volunteer to Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

The marketing campaign I designed for them hinges on the graphic to the right, which handily explains our name. Look at how you spend your time: sitting in traffic, surfing the web, watching TV, and find an hour you can reallocate to changing the life of one child.

Even if you don't live in the south Puget Sound area, I encourage you to reach out to one of these organizations and ask "How can I help?"

Wearing a pin probably won't help cure cancer, nor will expending electrons on a Facebook post. But deciding you'll Tivo your favorite show so you can spend an hour helping a kid with his homework? That effect is immediate and measurable.

Even if I am a microscopic dot atop a microscopic dot, within my reach are hundreds of other microscopic dots and the shadow I cast touches an unknowable number of other microscopic dots.

Which is why I'm wearing a blue rubber band on my left wrist as I type this. And why I don't hide the friends who remind me about the things I'd rather forget. Because my grandfather and my father were taken from us prematurely by cancer.

And while these things do cause the beast under the stairs to stir and grumble, they also keep me from pretending it's not there. Because when i do that, I forget to reach out to the person next to me. To break out of my protective isolation and touch another person.

Because this microscopic dot is here to make a difference. I hope you are too.