Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? That’s the National Novel Writing Month, an event sponsored by a group of literary terrorists who encourage bored housewives and unwashed yokels to write an entire 50,000-word novel during the month of November.
NaNoWriMo’s growth in popularity is simply astounding. It was launched in 1999 by a group of 21 writers in the San Francisco area, but within two years had 5,000 “writers” participating in it. By 2010, the non-profit group that sponsors the event had over 200,000 participants.
There are surprisingly few people who are openly critical of NaNoWriMo — probably because actual published authors are understandably wary of offending the kinds of people who buy lots of books. But this event sucks, and to pretend otherwise is to humor the delusional, literature-destroying idiots that participate in it.
NaNoWriMo’s guiding philosophy seems to be its obsession with support group-style validation. We’ll do this together. We’ll encourage each other. One brave blogger (whose comment section gets annually inundated by NaNo “novelists” on the defensive) pointed out that these people have turned the craft of writing fiction into an ordeal fit for a bucket list.
I’m not sure why someone “scared away by the time and effort involved” in novel writing would instead want to put themselves through the wringer of doing a whole novel in a month, but the “finish line” metaphor is telling; to the NaNoWriMo people, writing a novel is like running a marathon, something difficult and strenuous that you do only so you can say you did it before you died.
“But who is it hurting?” you ask. “What’s wrong with people writing novels just for fun?” I’d ask why we should encourage people to just produce more shitty writing. NaNo is a solution in search of a problem. There’s no worldwide shortage of novels. Go to the library– it’s full of excellent newly-released novels just dying to be read! And yes, there will always be new stories to tell, but any actual published writer will testify that it’s insanely fucking hard to find a publisher for their manuscript. Why? Because there are thousands of writers competing for every available publishing opportunity. We don’t have a shortage of writers, we have a shortage of readers.
The typical NaNoWriMo’er is hilariously deluded about his writing ability and creativity. (Check out this Tumblr of hilarious excerpts from the NaNo message boards if you don’t believe me.) It should be no surprise that this event came along in the aughts. After all, this is the perfect event for the millennial generation special snowflake who’s never been told he or she sucks at anything. The result of this much obliviousness is that you end looking like a character out of a Christopher Guest movie. Never a good look.
Let’s deal in a little bit of real talk here: Not everyone is gifted. In fact, most of us aren’t. I’m a barely-semi-athletic 34-year-old who enjoys playing tennis in my spare time. I try to play once a week for a few hours and I have my moments, but I basically more or less suck. My serve is comically unreliable and I get winded after about 30 minutes.
You know what I’ll never do? I’ll never end up on the court at Flushing Meadows playing Rafa Nadal. If I spent 50 hours this month practicing for the U.S. Open, it wouldn’t be a sign of my dedication. It would be a sign of mental illness.
The truth is, writing a novel is hard. That’s why most published writers actually started out writing journalism or short stories and eventually work their way up to a novel after years of shopping their stories around and participating in long, soul-sucking fiction workshops. Encouraging any random yahoo off the street to dive headfirst into novel writing is just encouraging the dumping of more pointless literary babbling out into the world. It’s the written version of noise pollution.
But NaNoWri doesn’t just endure mediocrity, it celebrates it. NaNoWriMo’s organizers don’t seem to care very much about the quality of the novels that get created. The website lists a total of only 93 published NaNoWriMo novels (a ridiculously small number considering that more than 256,000 people participated in 2011 alone) and the focus of the event is overwhelmingly on sheer word output. This isn’t a world where artisans take their time to lovingly create works of art, it’s a Chinese factory spitting out thousands of Snuggies.
And never forget one important fact about the novels that NaNoWriMo produces: No one will ever want to read your shitty vampires-meets-CIA thriller literary abomination. Your family doesn’t want to. You friends don’t want to. The truth hurts, but ignoring reality is far worse. There’s nothing sadder than a novel that absolutely no one will read.
What NaNoWriMo ignores is the glaring fact that you can’t just divorce the reader from the entire process of creating great art. Yes, each novel springs forth from the mind of its novelist but its greatness as a work of art is measured by its impact on those who read it. To pretend otherwise is a disservice to the people who are capable of writing truly great novels and its a disservice to literature itself.
NaNoWriMo isn’t making literature better, it’s making it worse.
