I’m enamored of the idea of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. People sign up on a web site, pledging to do their darnedest to write a novel in the month of November. Many have succeeded; many more not. Writing a 60,000-word book in 30 days is such an improbable task (2000 words a day?), assuming a standard of quality that a writer would set for himself or herself, that the failures are unsurprising. I signed up this year, hoping I might finish a certain prerequisite task in time. I did not finish the task, and my NaNoWriMo ended before it began.
But I like the concept so much! If only it weren’t so restrictive in the interest of standardizing the experience and hawking it. True, you’ve got to have focus if you want to sell an ambitious project to a lot of people, but some of us will always be excluded by a format, no matter how carefully designed.
Why a novel? Indeed, several of my friends are using NaNoWriMo this year to do projects that are not novels: a non-fiction book, a documentary, a cookbook. This shows that the month-long-death-march gimmick defines NaNoWriMo, not the novel genre. I personally wouldn’t feel quite right participating in the official NaNoWriMo unless I wrote a novel. That’s just me being a nerd.
And why a month? Why not two? Why not a fortnight? A week? Admittedly, a novel becomes less likely the shorter the writing time. Why not a short story in two weeks? Or better yet, just keep it at a month. That way you’d have time to do for a short story all the things you wouldn’t for a novel: revising, copy editing, cooling off, even rewriting.
Finally, why November? That’s maybe the biggest concession to solidarity that NaNoWriMo makes. I’ll admit it does imbue November with a sacred luster, but I’m supposed to wait another year, until November is once again a bad time for me to participate? I say, not “NaNoWriMo” but “My*WriMo,” where the * stands for whatever you want to write. So MyCoBoWriMo is My Cookbook Writing Month, and MyShoStoWriMo is My Short Story Writing Month. There are no restrictions, so if the spirit moves you, declare April to be MyToEiToBuiMo (“My Toothpick Eiffel Tower Building Month”). Go for it.
Of course, if you go your own way on this, no one will be doing it “with” you. No one will keep after you to do it. No one will care. But this is already the way it is with NaNoWriMo. No one can share your novel-writing experience. In the end, they say, each of us dies alone, and we also write alone (don’t believe the malarkey about collaborative novels!). Although the folks behind the web site have set up some instructional materials and automated tools to help you stay on track, really no one else cares what you do—unless you successfully complete a novel, of course, in which case your name gets moved from the wannabes list to the finishers. Well, that means something, I guess. However, as in the real world, no one will read your novel unless it gets published. So essentially NaNoWriMo recognizes you for having typed about half a million characters on a keyboard, and you languish in obscurity with a piece of crappy fiction on a hard drive somewhere.
At least if you schedule the ordeal yourself, no one can share the credit for getting you to withstand it.
I’m glad to be getting this off my chest, and it’s only taken me a month.
Ephebe's Journal 