101 Reasons to Stop Writing

November is National No Writing Month, my favourite month of the year, when writers the world over put down their pens to spend more time on the more satisfying minutiae of daily life. Gone are the long, lonely writing sessions, and the headaches and spinal problems induced by Writer’s Block and Blank Page Syndrome. Many people every year find National No Writing Month such a relief, they don’t return to writing.

National No Writing Month is so popular, it even has a community website, where tens of thousand of ex-writers discuss the positive change that not writing makes in their lives, and which books they’d rather be reading than writing their own. It even has the cutesy nickname NaNoWriMo …

Oh, for fsck’s sake.

National NOvel Writing Month is here once again to unleash the holy fury of a hundred thousand talentless wannabes who think that writing fifty thousand words in 30 days will earn them a steak at Larry McMurtry’s next barbecue, a paperback deal which values their efforts at $10 per word, and a seat next to Maya Angelou on Oprah’s next Book Club show.

Last year’s efforts topped out at almost 80,000 participants, almost 13,000 of whom completed the challenge, totalling almost 1 billion words, some of it almost readable. NaNo’s media kit also lists almost 20 participants who have subsequently been published, from almost 225,000 total participants over seven years. That’s a phenomenal success rate of 0.009%. This is about as close as anyone has gone to proving the Infinite Monkey Theory in real world conditions. (Yes, I’m going to use that gag every year.)

NaNoWriMo’s participation increases every year, and may reach 100,000 this year. Since NaNo participants clearly have a hard time understanding big numbers like 50,000, I’ve made a graph, including my projections for 2007:

If this growth rate remains constant, by 2014 there may be as many as 245,000 participants. That’s more than there are books published in a given year, including all the self-published 50,000 word novels written by former NaNo’s (and bought, almost exclusively, by the same former NaNo’s).

Thankfully, the proportion of “Winners” has remained relatively constant at around 16%, so I’m predicting around 16,000 winners this year — of whom, as many as nine may get published.

I neglected to mention something else the graph reveals — each year Nano participation grows by more people than completed the challenge the previous year. I think this underscores that, from the Nano point of view, the idea of writing a novel is more important than the result.