101 Reasons to Stop Writing

This interview with Sean Lindsay, conducted by Stephen Jayson Harris, was originally published in the November 2007 issue of NaNo Technology magazine, as a sidebar to the article “Corpus Incompletus: Themes in Unfinished NaNoWriMo Texts”. Republished with permission.

You’ve been an outspoken critic of National Novel Writing Month since the launch of your blog, a year ago.

Well, I’ve been critical of NaNoWriMo for a long time now, but I’ve only been outspoken about it on a dozen occasions, and only during November. The rest of the year I couldn’t give a shit.

What are your objections to NaNoWriMo?

“The concept of NaNo seems to be to give people the feel-good buzz of being a ‘Novelist’, with the barest minimum of work to justify it.”

Let’s start with the name. National Novel Writing Month. It’s so elitist. It deliberately excludes non-Americans, who have historically produced far better novels than their Yankee counterparts. I mean, there aren’t any famous American writers prior to 1906, and Shakespeare had written almost all of his plays by then. If they really cared about the world of literature, it would be called International Novel Writing Month. That shortens to InNaWriMo, which kinda sounds like “In a writing mood” if you say it fast. Oh, and the site would be written in the international language, Esperanto, and encourage people to write in it. I could get behind NaNo if it was simultaneously promoting the expansion of literaturo Esperanto.

Do you have any objections to the concept of NaNoWriMo?

The concept of NaNo seems to be to give people the feel-good buzz of being a “Novelist”, with the barest minimum of work to justify it. They say “Anyone can be a writer”, but that’s only true if you reduce the definition to the most basic level of “someone who writes”. That would mean that everyone who isn’t functionally illiterate is already a writer. The notion of being a writer is only attractive if it maintains the prestige society attaches to published, successful writers. Writing is the only activity where you can get away with using the noun like it’s a career choice and a badge of distinction, without having to demonstrate any of the effort or skill people normally associate with it.

“If you remove the notion of quality altogether, then the challenge simply becomes ‘Can you hit the spacebar 50,000 times in a month, with some letters in between?’.”

But society has no fixed definition of what constitutes a “writer”.

True, but I’d wager if you ask people not doing NaNo what being a writer means, the majority would define it more stringently than “someone who wrote a pile of crap, once”. Imagine if we defined other occupations this way: judges as “someone who passes judgement, no matter what that judgement is”, athletes as “someone who occasionally plays a sport”, or fuckheads as “someone who engages in cranial intercourse”. When you say “writer”, people think of literary greats, bestselling authors, and undiscovered genius. It’s that last one that people latch onto. NaNoWriMo is exploiting this hazy definition to say that anyone can join the Undiscovered Genius club, if they type for long enough.

Completing 50,000 words in 30 days is a challenge for most people.

Only because their conscience will not let them completely abandon the concept of quality, despite NaNo’s insistence that quality should not be considered. “Write crap!” they say, and be happy with your crap. But if you remove the notion of quality altogether, then the challenge simply becomes “Can you hit the spacebar 50,000 times in a month, with some letters in between?”. It boils down to finding the time, and nothing more.

You’ve been critical of NaNo’s wordcount goal in the past. What is your objection to it?

The wordcount target and deadline — fifty thousand words in thirty days — is, on the surface, completely arbitrary. Why 50,000 words? That’s not a novel, unless you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I’m pretty sure he ain’t doing NaNo this year. So why not 30,000 or 60,000? That at least would be easy to divide into 30 days. I thought they’d just picked a big cool-sounding number, but there’s something more sinister going on. They say you need to average 1,667 words a day, but if you actually divide 50,000 by 30, you get 1,666.666 recurring. That’s the Number of the Beast, people.

“Out of some 80,000 participants last year, only 13,000 completed the challenge — and all they had was an incomplete first draft of unknown readability.”

50,000 words is a significant portion of a modern novel.

But it’s only a portion of the process. It’s the first draft of half, maybe two thirds of a novel. Imagine if someone announced they were going to build their own house: they purchase some tools, and cut 50,000 pieces of lumber to length. Then they abandon the project, say “Now I’m a carpenter!”, and leave the wood to rot.

Many NaNo participants have gone on to publish novels.

And you could fit them all in one room. Unless one of them says “I never thought about being a writer until NaNo, and now I have a two-book deal!”, you can’t be certain that NaNo has contributed anything to their success. It’s even possible that NaNo made the end product worse — a rush job that only just passes publishing muster, instead of taking extra time to craft something really fine.

Are you saying that NaNo has no benefit or positive effect for participants?

I know that some writers — professional, but not full-time writers — use NaNo as a focusing tool, motivated by the encouragement to regularly update their wordcount. That’s all well and good, but they would be writing anyway. For everyone else, NaNo actively hinders the development of writing skills by discouraging any consideration of quality, and focusing on an arbitrary wordcount instead of plot, characterization, theme, or even the natural length of the story.

“A hundred thousand amateurs playing a massive, month-long online “I’m a Writer!” role-playing game.”

Many NaNo participants think that detractors such as yourself are afraid of competition.

Well, let’s just look at that for a moment. Out of some 80,000 participants last year, only 13,000 completed the challenge — and all they had was an incomplete first draft of unknown readability. Of these, it’s likely only a minuscule percentage actually finish the book, and pursue publication — even then, the only thing achieved is a deeper slushpile that literary agency interns have to trawl through. The few genuinely good writers are already “competition”, NaNo doesn’t make them so.

If you could change the rules of NaNo, what would you change them to?

Aside from scrapping it altogether? Get rid of the the wordcount, and the words “National” and “Novel”. Let the participants write, and discuss writing, at their own leisure. Let participants form their own invite-only critique groups, based on posted samples. A few good writers may emerge, and the wannabes will simply get bored. But a few hundred motivated, passionate writers working together sounds less impressive and newsworthy than a hundred thousand amateurs playing a massive, month-long online “I’m a Writer!” role-playing game.

Would you like to end with a pithy observation, or one of your lame analogies?

Can I do both? You should never be proud of accomplishing something a monkey can do, unless you’re a monkey. And, anyone can go to a junkyard and make an interesting-looking pile of car parts, but it’s the person who can drive away in it that gets the applause.

– Stephen Jayson Harris regularly covers NaNoWriMo for Abnormal Psychology magazine and ESPN. He completed the NaNo challenge in 2005 with a 50,000 word novel entitled Scream of Consciousness, which he finished in seventeen days by rhythmically bashing his forehead against the keyboard.