![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "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.
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Since when is 50,000 words a novel? Every guideline I’ve looked at suggests that the bare minimum is 60,000. Gotta love it when the target is flawed.
Why is it that whenever I see the acronym NaNoWriMo, I can hear Michael Caine yelling “You hear that, Aubrecht? We’re going to NaNoWriMo!” (Naturally, I can see several otherwise sane friends running about the room, flapping their hands and yelling “NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo!” in response.)
Wow. The graph is very pretty and well-designed, but I’m not sure I like the trend it shows. I could understand getting into NaNo if they made it clear that you’re only writing the rough draft of a novel, and that it’ll take a good six to eight months (if you’re lucky) of editing, and re-writing to get something anyone else would want to read. And that’s if you spent time before the contest deciding on some basic plot points, and designing your characters. Hell, I’ve written the first chapter or so of a novel (before I abandoned it, saving the world from yet another sci-fi cliche) and that took me a month by itself!
Maybe they misnamed it–National Novella Writing Month? National Non-Publishable Writing Month? Whatever, as long as it keeps the delusional off the streets…
jmnlman, NaNoWriMo’s wordcount is an arbitrary target, chosen to be achievable in the arbitrary time period. Calling this a “novel” is just the beginning of the slippery slope to total delusion that NaNo represents.
L, the entire point of NaNo is to redefine writing as a collectible merit badge, removing any notion of quality, so participants can say “I wrote a novel”. Even the notion of “winning” is secondary to simply participating.
Without reading the media kit, I can only wonder if the publishable works that came from the 20 published participants were the same works they wrote for NaNoWriMo. My money says no.
Sean, that graph is slick. Will you do my SPSS research methods homework?
I have several online buddies who are NaNoing! I try to be polite when they talk about it, but keep asking myself what the hell is going to inspire them to write the other 11 months out of the year? I mean if they need a group grope, this circle jerk to get going….
Also, I wondered what’s to stop someone from cheating? What’s to stop someone from posting what they’ve already written, polished and tightened up over months, (or years!), and saying it was all off the cuff, totally “spontaneous” when they win the big prize?
Ah….. studying forensics has made me quite the cynic.
While I usually enjoy the roasting of literary stupidity that goes on here, this is something that seems absolutely humourless to me in its accuracy. I haven’t read a single thing you’ve said about NaNoWriMo that does not resonate with me to the depths of my being.
Thank you, Sean and co. I can only pray that more people take heed of this message.
You want the extra cat turd atop that shit sundae? We should start a National Nonfiction Writing Month contest just to shut them up. Considering that any idiot can throw together 50,000 words and call it a novel (just look at the wanker who wrote Space Ark), I want to see the same people throw together a comprehensive nonfiction book, on any serious subject, in a month. Considering that right now I’d set fire to a bus full of nuns for a second good book on Australian triggerplants, I want to see the NaNoWriMo nutjobs take on that challenge.
Paul, they’re actually planning to start one.
And be fair… it’s NOT National Publishable Novel Writing Month.
Great minds think alike. Here’s the blog for National No Writing Month.
Heather, to quote Dick Cheney, “AAAAAAAAAAH! This sucks! Change it, Butt-Head! Change it! AAAAAAAAAAAH!”
I’m participating this year just to see if I can bullshit my way through 50,000 words.
Not all of us are under the glorious delusion that, whatever our slick 1666/wordperday fingers can churn out, it’ll surely be unique enough to win us an agent and a guarantee to be the next J.K. Rowling. In fact, there will be shameless quote theft in the first quarter of my ‘novel’, fan-fiction for itself in the second, and the last two will consist of everyday conversations between the two Art Noveau paintings hanging atop my bed.
My illiterate aunt told me I have a natural knack for words. Does anyone else want to root me on?
“My illiterate aunt told me I have a natural knack for words.”
With that kind of endorsement, there’s not a lot we could say to dissuade you.
[...] most of the snark – Sean Lindsay has declared “National No Writing Month” over at 101 Reasons To Stop Writing, and posted a couple more demotivators on the [...]
[...] Lindsay over at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing has this to say about the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Hint: remember the Infinite Monkey [...]
Hi, Sean. I just wanted to invite you over to my most recent post celebrating my 16,377 words of drivel written so far in my first NaNoWriMo novel. I posted one of your endearing NaNoWriMo demotivators, although my favorite demotivator will always be the one of the lonely person sitting on a bench writing while life passes him by. I couldn’t seem to find that one. If you could direct me to it, I’ll use it for another post. Anyway, I hope you like my post on how the cited demotivator actually motivates me. Sincerely yours, TIV
TIV, the Demotivator you’re thinking of is from December 2006.
I don’t understand why you think I’m going to validate your NaNo progress.
That’s the definition of “deluded.” Right, Sean. I can’t help myself. I’m hopelessly deluded.
While it is true that I’m just barely under a year late for posting here, I still felt the need to say something. Many people who write to be published are hopeless; this is true. Who you fail so consider are the people who write for fun. I, being one of them, can tell you that NaNoWriMo is quite the enjoyable experience. I have never even thought of trying to publish my NaNo novels; I just have fun writing them. It is a nice break from the small amount of serious and purposeful writing that I do. Either way, I don’t write for money or to get published. I write to write because I think that writing is fun. While you narrow-minded, overly-judgmental and egotistical people sit there and waste your lives away criticizing others and blogging; I shall try to write a novel that will never be published because it is enjoyable. Please tell me how watching television or even blogging ,or whatever it is you’re doing, is a better use of time then letting the wheels in our brains turn and coming up with silly plots just for the hell of it. At least we use our brains.
On a side note, I am quite aware that I am a hypocrite, in some regards.
Sincerely,
Mia
‘The entire point of NaNo is to redefine writing as a collectible merit badge, removing any notion of quality, so participants can say “I wrote a novel”’
Redefinition? I was under the impression it was quite like that already…