The bar for good writing isn’t any different for November novel writers. The definition of a “novel” (which my previous post quoted) also applies to November novels. Just because a participant wrote 50,000 words does not mean that those words constitute a novel.
NaNoWriMo produces drafts. It’s a fantastic opportunity for people who believed only a few people could write a novel to know that they can as well. Or at least, they can write a lot and regularly.
I thought I’d better clarify my position on National Novel Writing Month after my last post, which was meant tongue in cheek, but may not have appeared so.
Essentially, NaNoWriMo is not for me. I’ve always thought of my fiction as a long term project, something I would like to become my career. Plus I’m an edit as you go type of writer. I like to get things in some sort of order before I move on to the next chapter, paragraph or, as is sometimes the case, sentence.
I’m not joking. I’ve spent an entire day agonising over a single sentence before. It’s fun writing fiction.
However, none of this means that I look down upon or think badly of those people who are currently bashing out thousands of words a day to try and complete a novel in a month. Because whether the quality of writing is there, and whether anything ever comes of all those words is unimportant.
Like Paulo Campos says in the article and quote above, NaNoWriMo produces drafts. Not only that, it gets a whole load of people writing fiction who wouldn’t normally do so. And that’s a good thing.
It’s easy to naysay because it’s genuinely horrible to think that something that took years of research, planning and sacrifice can be done in a month. But you’d be missing the point and falling into that forever dangerous trap that we writers continually fall into…
Thinking it’s all about us. It’s not. It never is.
