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Keep Writing Your Awful Book: A Retrospective On NaNoWriMo 2010

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Across the globe, thousands of people will be finishing tentative drafts of novels as we near the end of November. This may seem pretty startling to some (which perhaps it should), but it’s all because we’re entering the home stretch of National Novel Writing Month. This event, now in its 11th year, challenges your everyday person to write a novel in just 30 days’ time.

If that sounds kind of insane, that seems to be the point. The organizers of National Novel Writing Month treat the endeavor as more of a challenge, like a hot dog eating contest, more than they do an urgent drive to create significant literature in 30 days’ time. The National Novel Writing Month website (which has been distastefully abbreviated to NaNoWriMo.com … was it made up by Michael Scott?) is supportive of using the novel-writing process as therapy. The message is, if you can finish a novel in 30 days, you can do anything. Although that’s pretty dorky, I’m okay with the sentiment of that.

However, this particular National Novel Writing Month has been fraught with controversy. The key player in this whole affair is Laura Miller, a co-founder and senior writer at Salon. She, in a manner rather typical of anyone who writes for Salon, assailed its participants as self-indulgent, naive, and generally incapable of good writing in any capacity.

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