Why NaNoWriMo?

My buddy Ken over at Fifthwind, a Writer’s Journey, doesn’t get NaNoWriMo. That’s okay, cuz he’s not required to get it. But I think the conversation over there (or in Ken’s words, bashing) about National Novel Writing Month is pretty interesting. NaNoWriMo is kind of like patchouli oil; you either love it or think it stinks.

Why spend time shooting out 50k words of first-draft crap in a month when you could spend much longer doing it? I say, flush it out fast and then clean up nice and tidy with NaNoEdMo in December (that would be National Novel EDITING Month). Imagine, a publishable first and second draft within two months. What better way to end the year and kick off the New Year than with a finished novel? Improbable? Maybe. Impossible? Definitely not. There are quite a few published books out there whose humble beginnings are owed to NaNoWriMo.

Ken does makes some valid arguments, but he’s biased because he is a very driven, disciplined, and methodical writer. He doesn’t need to crash write in a NaNoWriMo event. He’s also a blogger, so he’s got built-in camaraderie. He is enjoying the road he’s on and finding real success, sticking doggedly to his everyday writing schedule. Awesome! But the appeal of NaNoWriMo remains elusive. Y’all take it easy on him.

For Ken and anybody else who just doesn’t get NaNoWriMo, let me say that most real writers write all year long on one-to-many projects. They don’t wait all year to write something only when the ghosts and goblins have gone to bed. November is just a break in the regular action that may or may not produce something worthwhile. In fact, most writers I know have gone into it with a plot or plan of some sort already in place. (Even if you don’t have a plan, the act of brain dumping is still good exercise for your muse — like taking your car for a long day trip to blow out the gunk. She just runs better after that.) So when they start cranking up the word counts, they’re headed in the direction they would have taken on a slower road anyway. They’re challenging themselves to get from prologue to epilogue faster — and maybe making some new writing buddies and fun memories along the way.

Why November? Why not June? These are age-old questions, my friends, just like these: Why does a man scale Mount Everest? Why does an eagle soar? Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can! Why November? Why not? Do we have any interest in springboard diving other than during the Olympics? Every four years, we gather around the TV to see crazy, celluliteless people perform a couple of dives that they’ve trained day and night to do for four years. We don’t want to see them training everyday, we just want to see the end product, an impossible dive that few other people on the planet can do. We’re happy to reward their feats with shiny medals. We, as an aspiring species, admire such abilities and the seemingly incomprehensible sacrifice at which they come.

Actually, I wrote this post really fast, kind of like a Nano dump, and look at the glowing crap I came up with! See what can happen? And you thought NaNoWriMo wasn’t a noble pursuit.

©2008 K. Jayne Cockrill