Thirteen days into the literary abandon known as NaNoWriMo and I am behind in my word count, again. These ‘Wizeguy’ writtens have taken on a life of their own. The thought of postponing my columns while the thirty day challenge was going never once crossed my mind. Well, not until I just wrote those words. It is just as important for me to do this…as it is for me to do that. I recommend NaNoWriMo to people as what it is for me: a challenge to process. It is opportunity, permission, and pressure to try new things, both in your material by treading the unknown and your procedure because a several-thousand-word-per-day habit is not one that many people cultivate. It is, however, a very healthy one, and even if we only manage to do it one month out of the year, the challenge, the brain exercise, stays with us.
Criticisms of NaNoWriMo seem focused on what is produced, which I think no one will argue against being a great many hastily written words. I will also not argue the point that it’s short-sighted to turn around on December 1st and submit your draft to an agent or publisher. It would be nice if everyone in every industry knew what they were doing, prepared themselves, considered their choices, did their research, and never jumped the shark or the gun. However, I think it’s fair to say that this doesn’t happen often, anywhere. Developing a good set of tools (or friends) for ideas, inspiration, revision, editing, proof-reading, and understanding whether your work is finished (enough) and how it fits into the market you want to sell to is an entirely different procedure than producing the work in the first place, and takes different refining. It’s important, but so is the work.
A lot of crummy writing gets published. My list of evidence to back this up probably has some things on it that will overlap a lot of people’s, and some things that really won’t. I would like to make a living writing, or at least to supplement my living enough to take a nice retreat now and again to do more of it, if nothing else, and that relies on a certain amount of being better at it than most people. That said, I am a supporter of writing, and creative processes as a whole, not being elevated to exclusive clubs, the lofty reaches of which the fortunate may look down on those less so and tell them their dreams aren’t worthy. It’s healthy for us to open ourselves up and do these things, and it is through rigorous and frequent practice that we improve in whatever we’re doing. Those things are universal, and uniting, and NaNoWriMo not only provides encouragement but a really stellar community out of those common traits, which is yet another incredible value in the event.
Nano gets those would-be writer’s like myself engaged and writing. It is not an easy thing to write thousands of words daily without editing, at least for me, but the one thing I can say is that I’m grateful for this challenge because I am learning to write freely, I’m enjoying the experience and I’m writing with a purpose. But the best part is…I’ve started, finally, writing a novel. And I’m very happy about that.
-Dagobot
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