Journal Entry
It’s November, that typing time of year again
Carolyn Kellog exhorts people to ignore Salon’s digs at National November Writing Month (where many attempt to write a novel in a month). She points out that the Laura Miller’s base assumption, that all those wannabe writers are sucking away the pool of readers, is rather poor logic:
And is a large pool of hopeful writers really a terrible thing? Are there not thousands more marathon runners than medalists, more home chefs than pros who might ever run a restaurant kitchen? What’s wrong with an enthusiastic amateur class of writers? Who says they’re not readers, anyway? I’ve yet to see anything more substantial than a dinner party anecdote.
Good point. We tend to remember the handfuls of people who are like ‘dude, I want to write a novel’ or who’re like ‘I’m working a novel too,’ but truth is, I go through the vast majority of my day running into people who are consumers of entertainment and not creators. The reason the world suddenly seems dominated by excited new writers is because of our own little perception bubbles created by our carefully delineated online bubbles of reality.
I’m willing to bet the lady who cuts my hair twice a month has no clue what NaNoWriMo is nor really cares, much like most people living in this town.
For most professionals every day is NaNoWriMo, and some of the backlash comes from that same sort of annoyance that regulars in tourist towns have when all of a sudden a horde out of out of towners descends on all the local spots all giddy with enthusiasm, they’re loud, they don’t understand most of the local customs, they clog up the streets, and they raise the noise level in your favorite watering holes.
It’s an understandable annoyance. But some of those visitors will fall in love with the town, and move there (I was just reading the blog post of a new author who, after much revision, sold their November book. After revision.) No sense in being rude, quite a few of them there visitors even help drive the local economy (ie: they buy books) in part.
Just as when I lived in a tourist destination (the Caribbean, and later the same attitudes were voiced by people in Newport, Rhode Island when I was there for a summer), I understand the prickliness. But I myself don’t mind the visitors. Some will leave NaNoWriMo realizing how hard writing a novel is. Some will self publish and sell their statistical 10-200 copies. Others will move to town and maybe sell their book, or settle into continuing to write well past November.
But, do realize, if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, that for quite a few, you’re the guys that just joined the gym on January the 2nd. The regulars have been here a long time, and you’re running around talking about exercise like it was just discovered for the first time. Last year, of the 167 thousand or so who started the novel, 130 faded away, much like the people who buy gym memberships usually fade away.
The reason some people are jaded, is because the numbers dictate that most people trying this are going to fade away. So they’re reacting against what they feel is a sort of ‘faddish’ commitment. Don’t take it personally. Stay in the gym after November and pretty soon the snarkiness will fade, and you might even find yourself, after twelve months, having a knee jerk reaction to the sudden upswelling of excitement!
The best advice I can give, is that if you’d like to be a serious writer, don’t stop on November 30th. Keep going. Maybe not at that same pace, but the daily writing.
pic via runneralan
Filed under the topic Uncategorized on November 3rd 2010 at 9:14 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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1. Nobu on Nov 3rd, 2010 at 9:35 pm
I look at nanowrimo as a time for people to challenge themselves to something. It doesn’t hurt me as a writer for 170k other people to try to write a (short) book. I know lots of other professionals who do it. Thanks for posting the article links, the Salon stuff is hilariously wrong.
All of most voracious readers I know are writers
2. Andrew Trembley on Nov 3rd, 2010 at 9:39 pm
We need to start promoting December as NaNoRevMo…
3. Catherine Shaffer on Nov 4th, 2010 at 8:31 am
I’ve seen links to that Salon article, but don’t consider it worth clicking through. It’s clearly just crankiness, and if what she’s saying is “be a good reader, stop writing your novel and start reading mine,” well that’s all kinds of offensive. Where does she even get off?
The people at the gym in January are annoying because they crowd the place and use resources which would not be so scarce if they would buy and use a membership all year long. (Then the owners could afford to expand or buy more equipment.) It’s frustrating to have to wait forty-five minutes for your half hour on the stairmaster. But there’s no shortage of words in the universe. A thriving group of amateur novelists cannot BUT help working professional novelists by creating excitement and interest in the craft, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of a reality check on those “if I only had time, I would write a novel” boasts you hear from non-writers. From a purely selfish point of view, it’s a win-win to encourage writing ambitions on your fans. The ones who fail will be even more loyal readers, and the ones who succeed become friends/colleagues and you get writer karma points.
In light of all of that, maybe you’ll be amused to hear that my NaNoWriMo tally as of today is 0. Fail early, fail often, that’s what they say. (Well, perhaps it’s not that portable from the drug discovery business.
4. Mark Terry on Nov 4th, 2010 at 9:08 am
Don’t do NaNoWriMo simply because damn near every day is WriMo (or WriDa, I suppose). I tend to roll my eyes at it, but whatever folks, if that’s how you want to spend you time, good for you. My often unstated but loudly thought for people deciding to write a novel is: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Somewhere along the lines I figured out how to do it for a living and realized there’s no THERE there.
5. Al Bogdan on Nov 4th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Comically, this year all the people I know who are doing NaNoWriMo are actually professional writers who would have been writing anyway. I think they joined in for fun, social interaction, and maybe to try to use it to push themselves to finish something a touch faster than normal.
While I’ve finished novel length work in the past, though never in a month, this year I joined in because I was curious to see if saying I was doing NaNoWriMo would change how my family treated my writing time. I’ve been trying to train them to leave me in peace when I’m writing for years. I was curious what would happen if I said I had a deadline, and needed to get in X number of words done every day, and kept saying how far behind I was getting. Total fail yet so far.
6. Steve Buchheit on Nov 5th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
It’s not like there’s a drastic shortage of words in the world and all those NaNoWriMo people soaking up all the good ones, leaving the rest of us the dregs.
As someone who gets jazzed when I’m writing in the presence of other people writing, NaNoWriMo is just more energy into the universe. Energy I can feel vibrating and sparking at the edges, just waiting for me to tap into.