Keep Writing Your Awful Book: A Retrospective On NaNoWriMo 2010

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.

The controversy stirred up by Miller has filled the month with National Novel Writing Month commentary of all kinds.The Atlantic offered a pretty thorough rebuttal. On the other hand, HTMLGIANT decided to offer a more realistic calendar for writing a novel in a month. Regardless of what people think about National Novel Writing Month, the common thread seems to be that there’s a limit to how much faith to put behind an unrevised manuscript cobbled together in a month’s time. Even National Novel Writing Month’s official website admits this.

If everyone can agree on that, there’s not much left to argue about when it comes to participating, right? If you start on a novel knowing it’s quite unlikely to be a sterling product, you’re doing it for the novelty or for the challenge.

I’m not participating in National Novel Writing Month. Even if I had the time, I think it’s a frivolous experiment. However, I want to defend National Novel Writing Month against Miller’s claims, which are misleading and unnecessarily hurtful. In particular, there are three particular points Miller makes that have wider implications in the realm of writing and publishing. Miller’s article is symptomatic of an increasing hostility towards the act of writing altogether from within the industry itself. Here are the arguments she makes, and my objections to them:

1. National Novel Writing Month unleashes the hounds of hell on publishing houses, literary journals, and agents.

Miller writes, “it’s clear thatNaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they’ll shortly receive.” She later enumerates horror stories of publishers being bombarded with quadrillions of query letters and manuscript submissions of abysmal quality. All of this terrible literature is let loose upon the world.

How melodramatic.

There’s surely some truth that some publishers get awful National Novel Writing Month manuscripts that are likely to cause some Raiders of the Lost Ark-type face-melting. However, consider this: If you aren’t aware, either from common sense or from all the admonition on the web, that a novel written in 30 days is going to be in pretty rough shape, you probably aren’t capable of producing a great work of literature any time soon.

National Novel Writing Month doesn’t cultivate deficient writers to the extent Miller suggests, because most of these people were going to toil on awful manuscripts and send them out for publication anyway. If anything, a few solidly placed rejection letters will be enough to eliminate their delusions.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for publishers because November is a busy month full of terrible manuscript submissions? I hope not, because I don’t. Anyone who’s worked in publishing, or even known someone who worked in publishing once, or known anyone who dated anyone who was roommates with someone who later worked in publishing can tell you: sorting through awful manuscripts is part of the day-to-day operations of any publisher, regardless of circulation or medium.

Rejecting a manuscript is pretty easy. If you start reading it, and it‘s terrible, send a rejection letter. It’s not like they’re personalized. Regardless of what anyone tells you, no publisher reads through the entirety of every single manuscript, especially if it is apparent immediately that it’s garbage. If November is a marginally worse month for them, boo-hoo. I’m sure Target cashiers have it worse on Black Friday.

2. National Novel Writing Month reinforces self-indulgent writing, instead of selfless reading (whatever that is).

I kid you not; Miller refers to the act of reading as “selfless.” This is a woman who gets paid to have her book reviews read across the country. Let me shed a tear for how much she’s sacrificed. Move over Gandhi; here comes Laura Miller!

Reading is just as selfish as writing; I don’t read books as an act of charity, but rather because I want to have my emotions evoked and I want to be entertained. Reading is simply not a selfless activity.

Miller says that, because of influences like National Novel Writing Month, everyone’s writing and no one’s reading. If writers truly cared about literature, she implies, we’d all put aside our aspirations to write publishable material and just read book after book until we’re sufficiently remediated. By writing, we’re just creating more junk in a community that has too much junk anyway.

People aren’t reading books in America, true, but is it the fault of aspiring writers? Well, let’s see. The best-sellers of 2010 have been Eat, Pray, Love and some bullshit by Dan Brown. Who’s reading that garbage for its tremendous insight? The general American public. How about the increasing amount of courses colleges and universities have been offering on fundamental English reading and writing skills? Are writers in those classes?

Indeed, American literacy and cultural awareness is not at a high point. But really, was great literature ever a high priority in the lives of the public? If it weren’t for high school English classes, I doubt most people would have even pretended to read The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby.

If you aren’t an avid reader, what gives you the idea to write books in the first place? I started writing because I was envious of the power great literature had over the people who actually appreciated it. Anyone who doesn’t understand the crucial connection between reading and writing is the same type of person mentioned earlier who is going to send out nauseous Sailor Moon fanfic manuscripts, regardless of circumstance. Increased reading isn’t going to help as much as a little self-awareness will.

I wish this ended with Miller, but it’s something I’ve seen with increasing frequency across many literary outlets. For example, there’s Tin House’s latest submissions policy. If you want to send a manuscript their way, you must include a receipt for a book you’ve purchased recently. If you don’t have a receipt, you have to write 100 words on why not. When did literary magazines become so paternalistic?

I wasn’t about to write 100 words on why I don’t save receipts or even ask for them half the time. Nor should anyone. Instead of hassling writers, which are as much a reason why literary journals exist as the readership, why don’t they put some more money into community literacy campaigns?

Well, because reading will no longer be this prestigious, ultra-snobby thing that only the “elite” do. Do you really think publications like the New Yorker want literature to become a populist form of entertainment?

3. National Novel Writing Month encourages people who shouldn’t be writing novels in the first place.

It’s true that the 50,000 word manuscript that you create in 30 days is most likely not going to be a worthy contribution to literature. A manuscript you work on for years is not even guaranteed to be a worthy contribution to literature. However, nowhere on the National Novel Writing Month website does it say that your finished project will be worth anything in terms of greater literary merit.

The truth is, no matter how bad your 50,000 word manuscript is, you will be a better writer for finishing it. It doesn’t mean you’ll be a great writer. It doesn’t mean you’ll be a good writer, even. What it does mean is that the experience of cobbling together that novel will give you practice, will refine your urges into something beyond an urge.

It will give you a realistic idea of how difficult the act of good writing is, and it will make you appreciate how important the revision process is. Every great writer has gone through this process in some way or another; it may not have been in 30 days, but there are at least 50,000 discarded words that any given canonical author has crossed out before they refined their work into what we know today.

So, if you’ve undertaken the experiment of National Novel Writing Month, I say keep going. If you’re a realistic person, you’ll take it for a learning experience and a nifty curiosity. Maybe with enough revision, you could end up with a decent product. National Novel Writing Month shouldn’t be the finish line of a novel-writing endeavor, but rather the beginning.

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Mark Andre Clements is a fiction writer and a freelance journalist. His work has appeared in Seafarers Log, and in many anonymous SEO articles about cheap vacations.

See Also: Way to go, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2010 Report: Week 3, The NaNoWriMo Blues, Jumping on the Bandwagon for NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo: The Updates Continue, NaNoWriMo: Perfection Versus Productivity, Momentum, Why I’m Quitting NaNoWriMo, and 12 reasons to ignore the naysayers: Do NaNoWriMo.

[tags]NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, writing, novel writing, november, column, essay, la times, salon, article, publishers, authors[/tags]