“Some [submissions] are only just over 50,000 words, and one was exactly 50,000. Another had ‘done for the day’ every 1,600-1,700 words.”

“I don’t know where all this is coming from,” said one editor who wished to remain anonymous and employed. “By Wednesday, my email Inbox looked like I’d somehow subscribed to a live submission feed from BookSurge or Lulu. By Friday, the mail was stacked up floor to ceiling in the hallway outside the company offices. With the financial crisis, we can’t even afford to feed our interns, so I’m stuck going through the slush. And all of it seems so … unpolished, like a first draft, like they’d just finished writing it the day before. Who’s writing all this stuff, and why are they sending it to me, and why now? Why does the end of November always mean a deluge of crap?”

An anonymous literary agent agreed: “Most of the submissions I’ve received this this week are too short to be contemporary novels. Some are only just over 50,000 words, and one I got via email was exactly 50,000, cutting off mid-sentence. Another one had ‘done for the day’ or something about going to bed every 1,600 to 1,700 words or so. It’s a lucky standout that even has an introductory paragraph before the opening. Tell you what, though: judging by the subject matter of these submissions, poor is the new cancer.”

Barry Lyndon, editor of poetry journal The Contented Dodo, reported that he received over a thousand submissions during the week. “We usually get seven or eight. Twelve is a busy week, and that includes responses to funding requests. I think we might have opened the floodgates by amending our submission criteria to include ‘prose poems’, but really, none of the submissions I glanced at even mentioned dodos, and each issue of TCD only runs about 5,000 words. Someone would’ve had to write the Divine Comedy of dodo poems for us to dedicate ten issues to it.”

One literary professional interviewed was upbeat about the situation: Edwin Drood, editor of online literary journal The Unconscious Novella, said: “This spike in submissions is wonderful. We have enough material to publish a randomly chosen novella every day for the next decade. We can’t pay contributors, of course, but you can tell these submissions weren’t written with real publication in mind.”

Stephen Jayson Harris covered the publishing industry for What Fish is That? magazine until he was laid off in September. He now works as a bouncer at a Starbucks establishment, and is writing a book about the upcoming death of publishing.

• NaProMo
  National Procrastination Month is by far the largest community challenge project, with participants throughout the world (though most participants don’t even bother signing up). All you have to do is put off whatever you can put off, until at least the beginning of December. It’s also the oldest community challenge, predating NaNoWriMo by millennia. In fact, recorded history began when an ancient participant failed the challenge.
• NaMoGroMo
  National Moustache Growing Month, otherwise known as Movember, challenges participants to let the mo gro. Women are encouraged to participate.
• NaNoMoMo
  National No Moustache Month challenges the partners of NaMoGroMo participants to convince them to shave the mo.
• NaNaGaMo
  National Navel Gazing Month invites participants to ponder, mull, ruminate or philosophise over an existential, theoretical or theological question, for the entire month. Extra points are given if the participant:
  • Achieves nothing else in the month, except basic maintenance of their earthly vessel
  • Is able to convince someone else to take care of the basic maintenance of their earthly vessel
  • Frequently refers to the work of an earlier philosopher they’ve read
  • Frequently refers to the work of an earlier philosopher they haven’t read
  • Spends the month arguing the same point with the same person, to no conclusion
  • Ends the month with exactly the same opinion
• NaPerMeMo
  National Perpetuate a Meme Month invites participants to spread Internet memes, via blogs, emails, IMs, and particularly by describing them to others in person. Extra points are given if:
  • The meme is more than a year old
  • The participant doesn’t check other sources to see if the meme is pure bullshit
  • The participant creates their own derivative example of an existing meme (such as their own Lolcatz photo, or Demotivator)
• NaTeYoFriYoPlaMo
  National Tell Your Friends Your Plans Month is very popular amongst young people, especially college students. Participants are encouraged to tell their friends what they plan to achieve in in the short and long term. Extra points are awarded if the plans require extraordinary serendipity, divine intervention, or a suspension of the fundamental laws of the universe. Bonus points are awarded for returning participants if they haven’t achieved any of their plans from the previous year, and if they have all new plans this year.
• NaWhiAboDePubMo
  National Whine About the Death of Publishing Month encourages participants to engage in lengthy discussions about how publishing is going to hell in a handbasket, and to make predictions about when the industry will collapse and society will abandon reading altogether. Now in its 400th year! Extra points are given if the participant:
  • Uses the example of a bestselling book they think is bad as evidence that human civilisation is on the verge of self-destruction
  • Uses their own failure as a writer as evidence that the publishing industry doesn’t know literature from a pile of manure wrapped in a tabloid
  • Fails to see the irony in their refusal to buy any more books until the industry lifts its game
• InIOToLiAmAgMo
  International It’s Ok To Like Americans Again Month launched only this year – November 4, to be exact – and already it has millions of signups worldwide. Participants are encouraged to openly discuss American politics without shaking their heads in disbelief, to see American movies, read American books and listen to American music without feeling ashamed, and to give American tourists the opportunity to prove themselves to be boorish assholes, instead of simply assuming it.
• NaNaNaNa-NaNa-NaMo
  National Sing Along Without Knowing the Words Month – If you get through an entire song without anyone noticing, you win. You’ve been participating for years.
• NaIDoThiThaFuMo
  National I Don’t Think That’s Funny Month challenges participants to write to so-called satirists and comedians, and explain exactly why their brand of humour is wrong, illogical, unacceptable, dangerous to children and generally devoid of value or place in civilised society. Extra points are given if the participant:
  • demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the concept of satire or comedy
  • reacts as if the piece was intended seriously, and refuses to back down when they discover it wasn’t
  • insists that the benchmark for publication should be whether the participant thinks it’s funny
  • insists that satire is only clever or funny when it’s obvious or clearly labelled that it’s satire
  • insists that anyone who finds humour in the piece must be just as mentally retarded as the author
  • gives examples of other satirists or comedians they do understand in order to prove that the author isn’t funny
  • attempts to give their own examples of what satire or comedy really is in order to prove that the author isn’t funny
  • uses the word “sorry” sarcastically
  • claims to support the right to free speech while insisting that the author must voluntarily relinquish this right
  • threatens an organised boycott amongst the seven people they know
  • threatens physical violence upon the author, should they happen to wander into the participant’s basement
  • Complains anonymously, especially if doing so in a blog or forum the author will surely never read

Some of the challenges that didn’t make the Top Ten:

• NaBuSewMo — National Button Sewing Month
• NaCroSoMo — National Crossword Solving Month
• NaSoKniMo — National Sock Knitting Month
• NaRhiNoMo — National Rhinoceros Month (If you see a rhino, you win. Very popular in Africa.)
• NaQuiPoOnYoBloMo — National Quit Posting On Your Blog Month
• NaCompAboBroIncoMo – National Complain About Browser Incompatibilities Month
• NaFaSoLaTiDohMo — National Scales Singing Month

November is also NaCreYoOwNaNoJoMo — National Create Your Own NaNoWriMo Joke Month. Please feel free to post your own contributions in the comments below. Extra points if your entry is vaguely pronounceable.

So put yourself in this hypothetical frame of mind: you’re about to purchase a novel (a stretch for some of you, I’m sure), you’re reading the back cover blurb, and you discover this nugget of information:

While you’re here, if you know of any examples of novels written in 30 days or less — that don’t suck, like a mudslide in a collapsing mineshaft — please let me know in the comments below. (You can’t mention your own novel, unless it was published by a company that paid you, and copies were sold to people you don’t know.)

For decades literature has lauded the image of the tortured writer who dedicates years, even decades, to crafting a "perfect" novel, while denigrating the "hack" writer who produces a book a year. But it wasn’t always so — at least to the extent that the definition of hackery was a lot less than a year.

"Asimov is said to have written for 8-12 hours a day, every day, except on days where he had to travel somewhere to hear people tell him how great he was."

In the pre-television years of the Twentieth Century, many authors made their living from cranking out stories and novels as fast as publishers could print them. Writing under as many as 20 pseudonyms, for little pay and usually no royalties, these authors often wrote more than a dozen novels a year, sometimes for decades. While predominantly considered "pulp" writers (so named because once you had finished reading a pulp novel, you could eat it), some of these writers have been critically re-appraised in recent years and are now regarded as significant writers in their genre, or significant influences on later writers.

The 1920s to the 1940s were a boom time for these writers. Since the entire world at that time was still in black and white, the luridly colored covers of pulp magazines and books drew readers like moths to a naked flame. Even the movies, which were also black and white, inspired rather than threatened this market, because it was easier to re-read and masturbate to the cover image of the sleazy four-colour gangster’s moll on the book hidden at the back of your wardrobe, and the description on page 42 of how she really filled out her blouse, than to try to recall the three second shot of Louise Brooks where you sorta saw the outline of her breasts in that movie you watched at the Odeon six months ago.

These authors included (and this is by no means an exhaustive list): Edgar Wallace and Louis L’Amour, credited with over a hundred novels; "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust), Georges Simenon, and John Creasey, who wrote 400 novels or more;  and Isaac Asimov, who wrote, edited or compiled around 500 books, and yet is on virtually everyone’s shortlist as one of the most important science fiction writers of all time.

"The vast hordes of semi-literate readers no longer clamoured for endless variations of the same stories told badly — they had a new medium for that, one which required even less energy and imagination."

To produce their extraordinary output, these writers worked at a breakneck pace. Asimov is said to have written for 8-12 hours a day, every day, except on days where he had to travel somewhere to hear people tell him how great he was. One famous anecdote about Edgar Wallace has him dictating an entire novel in a single weekend. Frederick Faust apparently never bothered with a second draft for his pulp novels. I’m sure he and the others never bothered to re-read much of their work.

It should be noted that the definition of a "novel" was also different at this time. 60,000 words (200 pages) was around average, and much shorter novels, as little as 30,000 words (100 pages) were not uncommon. (Based on the easy-to-calculate 333 words/page: your eyesight may vary.)

From the careers of these writers, several general observations can be made:

• Not only is it possible to write a novel of publishable quality in a month, but it’s possible to have a successful career doing it consistently.
• These writers spent years honing their skills, usually as journalists and short story writers, before becoming successful enough to write full time.
• The majority of their output was shit, written to order for predefined markets, that only the most obsessive completist would want to read today.
• None needed something as inane as NaNoWriMo to inspire them. Next month’s rent bill, or a visit from their creditors was usually enough.

"The pulp novel is now all but dead, because the limited pleasure afforded by the reading experience is easily surpassed by playing Grand Theft Auto with your pants off."

By the 1950s, though, with the advent of television, the pulp venues began to disappear. The vast hordes of semi-literate readers no longer clamoured for endless variations of the same stories told badly — they had a new medium for that, one which required even less energy and imagination. After the CIA’s failed experiments with psychoactive mind control in the 1960’s, everyone began to see in colour, and movies and TV quickly followed suit. In contrast, attempts to print novels on multicoloured pages proved disastrous.

The 1960s introduced another phenomenon, that spelled the death of the quickie novel: the Mega Seller. Though there had been the occasional mega-hit before, the absurd success of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls made publishers realise that an individual book could sell in the tens of millions. They’ve been chasing this goal, and almost nothing else, ever since.

Since then we’ve seen what many refer to as the Death of the Midlist. Authors are no longer coddled by their publishers through long, lacklustre careers, happy to make narrow margins on moderate sales in the hope of eventually having a breakout hit. And apart from the occasional retro-cool reinvention, the pulp novel is now all but dead, because the limited pleasure afforded by the reading experience is easily surpassed by playing Grand Theft Auto with your pants off. To the people who would have been pulp readers sixty years ago, movies, television shows, video games and Internet porn have virtually replaced the need for written entertainment altogether.

"The literary quality of a novel is still partly measured in terms of how many years it took to come up with a completely original metaphor for constipation."

For a time in the late 1970s to the 1990s, the definition of "novel" expanded to the point where 60,000 words was uncommonly short, and 150,000 words (500 pages) was not unusual, even for debut authors. The increasing physical costs of printing such massive books has pushed the average back to around 90,000 words (300 pages), and authors of longer novels have to use their advance to purchase carbon credits. On the other hand, the costs of printing, promoting, and distributing a book are now so high that the break-even price point of a 100-150 page novel doesn’t seem like value for money to the consumer.

Meanwhile, the literary fiction scene has not changed as significantly as this. Sure, the market is smaller now than it once was, and there certainly is no modern equivalent to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary benders, or Norman Mailer punching out Gore Vidal. But literary fiction still maintains the mystique of the tortured writer, and the literary quality of a novel is still partly measured in terms of how many years it took to come up with a completely original metaphor for constipation.

We may never see another Asimov, and modern-day Simenons and Creaseys and L’Amours cannot hope to succeed the way the originals did. The market simply will not support this anymore. Individual novels are expected to be of a higher standard, worth the investment to publish and to read.

Which leaves your clumsy, meandering, plotless, padded, first draft, 50,000 word, 30-day novel only two places to go: your bin, or someone else’s.

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.

NaNoWriMo
The challenge of an arbitrary target and deadline
without the burden of any expectation of quality.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Michael Connors, the founder of MorgueFile.

And, because I don’t want to wait another year to use this:

NaNoWriMo
Anyone can be a writer, if you set the bar low enough.

click for larger version (widescreen)

Photo by Linda Badner, via Morguefile.

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.

You may have heard it called by the clunky abbreviation NaNoWriMo – ironic considering its core principle of logorrhoea in extremis, but quite befitting the typical quality produced.

101 Reasons stands in defiance of this absurdity, and hereby dedicates the month of November to countering the arguments of anyone who thinks this is a good idea.