Better Yet, DON'T Write that Novel...Or Do Write It.

Laura Miller, for Slate, states that National Novel Writing Month is a waste of time and energy.

From the article...

In that spirit, NaNoWriMo has spawned countless tutorials, tip lists, FAQs, wikis and Twitter feeds, all designed to cheer the contestants on to their own personal finish line. (It's no coincidence that the event is scheduled for marathon season.) "Make no mistake," the organization's website counsels. "You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create."

I am not the first person to point out that "writing a lot of crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive. "Submitting novels in Nov or Dec?" tweeted one, "Leave NaNoWriMo out of the cover letter ... or make it clear that it was LAST year's NaNo." Another wrote, "Worst queries I ever received as an agent always started with 'I've just finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel and ...'"

As someone who doesn't write novels, but does read rather a lot of them, I share their trepidation. Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it? Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.) The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.

Here's why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary.

As a point/counterpoint, Carolyn Kellogg, for the Los Angeles Times, lists twelve reasons to ignore the naysayers.

From that piece...

5. Miller writes: "NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary."

If it's unnecessary, NaNoWriMo would not have grown from 21 participants in 1999 to 167,150 last year. It's necessary for them. And of those who tried last year, 130,000 didn't finish -- there is clearly a gap between the hopeful and successful NaNoWriMo writer. In other words, a need.

If all those 167,150 people who participated in NaNoWriMo in 2009 were professional writers -- which seems unlikely -- and they used the month to jump-start or buckle down, so what? Writers use all kinds of tools and tricks to write. Would Miller force writers not to upgrade to Scrivener 2.0, or get Jonathan Franzen's Internet-less computer re-connected? Those things also are unnecessary -- but writers benefited from them.