No NaNoWriMo
Posted: Sun 1 November, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, The '09 Writing Project, Thoughts, Writing 2 Comments »Despite wanting to get back into writing, once again I won’t be taking part in NaNoWriMo (Or National Novel Writing Month, to give it the full title)
Both Andy and Gordon have written their thoughts about it, which pretty much resonate with my own. I think that while it can be good, I don’t actually want to write somerhing where, as the NaNoWriMo site puts it
The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
The idea is that you just write, you don’t (in theory at least) spend loads of time thinking about story arcs, characters, events and the like. It’s the equivalent of writing a brain-dump, a stream of consciousness. And that, I think, is my problem with it. I don’t like reading that kind of book – why the blinking sun-stunned chuff would I want to write one?
As it is, with D4D™ I’ve written some 800,000+ words (which is pretty sodding gobsmacking in itself) which is the equivalent of roughly eight novels. Obviously I know it’s not eight novels, but it does work as a comparison figure.
I’d like to go back to writing something ‘proper’ – it’s been an aim for a while, and will continue to be so – whether it’s a screenplay or something more novel-like. But I want to do it properly, not just as a “Write 50,000 words in a month” project. I’ve got some ideas that need developing – and there’ll be more about that in a different post sometime soon – but I honestly don’t think NaNoWriMo is for me.
Of course, if we come back at the start of November 2010 and I still haven’t got any of those ideas out into ‘proper’ writing, I might have a bit of a rethink on that.
I mostly disagree (not entirely, granted, but mostly).
Their emphasis in that quote is very unfortunate and I may be some way from the party line, but I always felt that the intention was you shouldn’t feel you need to spend time planning, not that you weren’t allowed to do so. To write with lower expectations and hence take some risks is very good practice, as is the timed challenge itself: it can still be valuable to write something even if it isn’t worth anyone else reading.
Your own reasons for not taking part are fair enough but I think you’re being a bit harsh on the event in general.
I agree that taking chances is an excellent thing, and even that lowering expectations can have a positive effect – that’s partly why I’ve taken it up this year, a) to give myself the kick up the arse required to start writing again and b) to see what happens if I ‘suppress the inner editor’ (as naNoWriMo puts it) which is totally against my nature to do.
My issue with the event is the word count obsession. I attended the kick-off metting of our local group and much of the talk was around joining the ‘Word Wars’ competition, where groups with the most amount of words win. There seems to be an unhealthy obsession with the number of words written, and very little interest in the *quality* of what’s written, and I’m afraid that doesn’t interest me in the least.
I’m taking part and giving it a go, but if I get further into November and think I may have started writing something that’s actually worthwhile, i’ll pull out of the event and continue writing at my pace, rather than the pace (and word count) dictated to me.