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.
![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
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Bravo! Well done, Sean. I am sincerely glad you posted this as I inadvertently let my subscription run out, ending with the October issue.
Peace,
- Dennis
http://www.donttipthewaiter.blogspot.com
I wonder how you feel about NaNoWriYe (unless you’ve mentioned it and I missed it - I skimmed through the archives). You can set a goal that keeps you at about 500 words per day, spread out over a year. Needless to say, this is a much smaller, quieter competition.
I just realized a way to make NaNoWriMo a viable business proposition. Every individual who announces that s/he’s participating has to purchase a $10,000 (in Canadian dollars) bond against completion of the project. If the participant doesn’t have 50,000 readable words to hand in to an independent jury at the end of November, the bond is used to pay for eight or nine toecutters to beat the living fuck out of the participant. Not only will the threat of crippling pain be enough to convince the wankers to stay away, but it would see lots of repeat business from people who just want to be sodomized with a six-foot sandstone strap-on. We’re always talking about how most NaNoWriMo participants are masochists, so it’s now time to take advantage of the situation and make some scratch at the same time.
[...] Read entire enterview. [...]
People give themselves the title of ‘writer’ for much less than NaNoWriMo. A fan fiction whose plot summary is ‘Captain Kirk’s secretly gay…but it’s not like he’s evil or anything’ will result in someone thinking of themselves a writer.
M.D., Writers setting their own targets is one thing, but any writing challenge with a wordcount target is inherently flawed. It puts all the focus on bashing out the first draft. The redrafting process is harder to quantify but at least as important.
Paul, the threat of financial or physical punishment is an excellent idea, and should be expanded to anyone who announces they’re writing a novel, and doesn’t deliver.
Jefferson, Stephen King once wrote that he occasionally gets people approach him saying “I’m a writer too,” and when he asks what they write, they say “I keep a journal.” This is identification, in the psychological sense, taken to an extreme degree. To identify with Stephen King, merely because you commit words to paper, shows the powerful attraction being a “writer” holds, and the staggering level of denial and self-deception required to support it.
Oh God, I have milk coming out of my nose….. :))
Tune in next month folks, when Seanie straps Santa over a barrel and reaches for the chilli flavoured lube!!
Hahaha, I keep a journal myself, though I wouldn’t identify with Stephen King due to the fact that I dunno…he’s ridiculously rich and famous.
Denial and self deception are right indeed. The reason I lost my desire to write fiction in the first place was because of the human train wrecks I kept seeing in creative writing classes. These fools pissed and moaned about putting together the two 1,000 word stories required by the instructor FOR THE WHOLE SEMESTER, but were convinced that they would be the next big thing, if only work and school didn’t keep denying their genius enough time to work. It took awhile to make the connection between myself and those whining about their ‘vision’ being ignored, but I’m glad I did, ‘unrecognized genius’ is not a phrase I’d like attached to my personal future.
I only wish that I’d quit writing sooner, I think I would have, if not for those teachers who told me that my liking to read meant that I ‘needed’ to write. The idea of ‘needing’ to write got ingrained before I was too young to know what the odds against ever succeeding in writing were. It was a fortunate stroke of luck that I saw those who had wasted their whole lives trying to publish work that obviously never going to appear anywhere but on their computer screen. It’s a level of delusion on par with those isolated groups of Japanese soldiers who cut off from the rest of the Empire, continued trying to fight World War Two into the 1970s.
“It’s a level of delusion on par with those isolated groups of Japanese soldiers who cut off from the rest of the Empire, continued trying to fight World War Two into the 1970s.”
That’s an excellent comparison. To those guys, “fighting the war” meant coming out of the jungle a couple of times a year to take a potshot at a villager and steal a pig.
*shrugs* I started a novel once and never finished it. If what I’d written had been any good, I could see using NaNo as a virtual kick in the ass to force myself to at least get the plot down on paper. Then I could spend the next three years deciphering my bizarre personal shorthand, adding vital yet omitted plot points, getting rid of awkward scenes that don’t seem to fit anywhere, and deciding whether I should keep that one scene of gratuitous, badly-written, utterly impossible human-alien sex.
…Maybe it’s a good thing my novel sucked.
“I mean, there aren’t any famous American writers prior to 1906, and Shakespeare had written almost all of his plays by then.”
I don’t know, man. Mark Twain was pretty pimp.
Yeah, and Oscar Wilde. He spent a couple of weeks in America, didn’t he? That’s all it usually takes for the Herns to adopt someone…. like Aussies with New Zealanders.
The biggest way to tell a naNoWriMo Dick from a committed writer of course, is that the N-Dick’s word count for the *other* 11 months is usually somewhere around fuck-all squared.
“I don’t know, man. Mark Twain was pretty pimp.”
Mark Twain was a pimp? I’ll never read Tom Sawyer the same way again. Did Samuel Clemens know? I hear those two were pretty tight.
Lee, fuck-all squared is an awful lot of fuck-all.
Jefferson, I finally went through my entire writing portfolio and my old magazine collection from my writing days, and I spent two solid days photographing the aftermath of that “needing to write” urge you described. I was shocked and appalled at the number of publications I’d hung onto for the last fifteen to twenty years, not because I thought they were particularly good or even interesting, but because they either inspired me to write something in response or rebuttal, or they held something that I wanted to use as reference for something I never got around to writing. As it is, I’m selling it all on eBay, and whatever doesn’t sell gets composted. It’s time to break the cycle once and for all.
(Posted in response to this plus the two posts that follow it)
Dude: You’re taking this whole NaNoWriMo thing *way* too seriously; a helluva lot more seriously than most of the participants, including me. Whatever it is — a challenge; a lark; an excuse to surf the web while my family thinks I’m writing — it’s fun. If it generates a draft, or part of one, that then gets re-worked for the next two years into something publishable — or not — no one really gives a flying fsck. Believe me, those who “win” NaNo who *really* think of themselves as novelists inspire plenty of eye-rolling and behind-their-back ridicule by those of us who think the whole thing is a hoot. Lighten up, for chrissakes.
Love your blog, btw. Any time I read a book now, I hear your (imagined) voice in my ear saying, “You will never be this good.”
#1 Dinosaur, Re: the whole NaNoWriMo thing,
Words For: 812,911,852
Words Against: 3,588
Sean: YOU wrote 812+ million words in favor of NaNo? Color me impressed.
I’d think you’d find NaNoWriMo to be so arbitrary and discouraging that it would make more people quit writing than continue. Which, according to the main thesis of your blog (with which I agree, btw), would be a good thing.
“I’d think you’d find NaNoWriMo to be so arbitrary and discouraging that it would make more people quit writing than continue.”
All evidence to the contrary, unfortunately.
[...] Sean Lindsay trashes NaNoWriMo while prophetically defining the true meaning of being a writer. [...]
“I mean, there aren’t any famous American writers prior to 1906, and Shakespeare had written almost all of his plays by then.”
Was this a typo on the interviewer’s part? Or were you being facetious, maybe? In the unlikelihood that you didn’t already know this, there were several famous American authors prior to 1906 (Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens and Henry James spring to mind).
It it OK to call yourself a “photographer” if you take pictures and put them on Flickr?
How about a “musician” if you play an instrument only in the privacy of your own home? Or at Open Mic nights?
John H, are you asking my permission?
I argue that the terms “photographer” and “musician”, like “writer”, carry the implication of career-level dedication, and it’s precisely this implication that people want to invoke when they use such terms about themselves.
So no, it’s not OK to call yourself a photographer, or musician, or artist or writer unless you have dedicated considerable time to improving your craft, have at least some aspirations to creating original art, and (perhaps most importantly) are prepared to have your work judged in comparison to professional standard, without caveats like “I’m just starting out” or “I don’t have the proper equipment”.
[...] My “friend” (he said I could call him that) Sean Lindsay at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing, posted an interview he did about NaNo and I agree pretty much with what he had to say about it. [...]
[...] also criticizes NaNoWriMo pretty severely. Like many people who disparage NaNo, I think he’s trying too hard. Yes, [...]
[...] I read rants against something like NaNoWriMo, and I remember that yes, there are people out in the world who [...]