Monkeys With Typewriters & Why I Hate NaNoWriMo
There are some people currently elbow deep in the afterbirth of NaNoWriMo. They’re struggling with both hands to pull that slippery, oddly-shaped idea they have out of the tight dark crevasse of their mind and bring it, stumbling and blinking, into the sunlight in time for December 1st, when at last – at last! – they can slap a ribbon on it and show the quivering mass of a month’s frantic creation off to their electronic friends.
I am not one of those people. I don’t like NaNoWriMo. I don’t think it encourages the best practise of writing in many people. Not least because it gives thousands of people an excuse to write Avengers/Pokemon mash-up fan-fic… ‘Hhb’… … Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Deadlines and Dirt
‘You don’t like NaNoWriMo!? But it gets people writing!’ you say.
Yes. It does. But not with the right mindset to be creative. It’s all about the one month deadline and it causes people to lose sight of the story because they’re too busy hitting the word total for the day. I don’t understand the need to treat NaNoWriMo stories as some sort of timed, hot-house obstacle course through your creative centres.
The joy of writing is not in deadlines and word counts, but in taking time to shape your work: to sit and let the ideas flow and then, when they ebb away, retreat from your keyboard until the next surge washes new fragments of story into your head. Pressure doesn’t always form diamonds. Sometime’s you’re just left with a hot pile of dirt.
You can argue that NaNoWriMo might just be a good way to get that much procrastinated novel off the ground; to start and try and get as much done and hope the momentum carries into December, but a lot of people don’t treat it like that. They treat it as a competition. I’m amazed at the number of people I see who brag about how many words they’ve done in a day but don’t brag about the actual words themselves. It’s all quantity not quality, when it should be the other way around.
Sewing The Seeds Of Bad Habits
It’s in this hot-house environment, where word counts are boasted or commiserated, that bad writing habits form. Habits such as overusing adjectives (always a big risk when you’re trying to fatten up that word total) or having too much description. It takes 28 days to form a habit apparently, so you can comfortably fit that inside November and still have two days to try and think up synonyms for ‘lips’ or ‘forests’.
Or maybe you don’t want to bother thinking up synonyms for yourself. Or any part of your novel that seems too much like hard work. In recent years there’s been an alarming amount of ‘ideas crowd-sourcing’ done, enabled by Twitter and forums. I’ve seen it first hand and you will have too. People will ask things like:
“What would be a good name for my protagonist? He’s 24, short, blonde, and likes dragons…”
“Can anyone think of a way for these two characters to accidentally meet?”
Really, this is the type of thing that a writer should be able to do. You should be able to use your own imaginations, like a real storyteller does.
You might think this is part of the community spirit behind NaNoWriMo; that it’s an exchange ideas in a friendly (but secretly ruthless) online atmosphere. It’s not. It’s people who can’t come up with their own ideas because they’re either too lazy or don’t have the imaginative capacity trawling the collective imaginative brainscape of other writers like a renegade tuna fleet, hoping enough stuff gets caught in the nets to squash together and package into a 50,000 word story.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem
By December 1st it’s all over and what is the upshot?
Are people enthused by their experience? No, mostly they’re just brain-drained after a month of trying to be creative at a hundred miles an hour. For most the results will be personally fulfilling but otherwise worthless.
One or two novels written during November will be good, readable, maybe even publishable, but that’s only because this is a numbers game and a few good stories are the statistical result of so many words being flung at the wall by so many people. Out of the chaos cogency will occasionally form. NaNoWriMo has become a 30 day Monkeys with Typewriters experiment. A grand field test to see if there’s truth to the old adage about how a room full of monkeys typing for long enough will produce Shakespeare. Except here it’s a planet full of humans and they’re just trying to come up with the next Hunger Games. In a month.
This is how I feel about NaNoWriMo, and I know it’s not a popular opinion. I think the idea of using a month to highlight the joy of writing and sharing stories is wonderful, but that’s not what NaNoWriMo is.
It’s an ego boost for those who can type fast and loose. It’s very name is a challenge, a ‘race you to the finish, last one there’s a loser!’ taunt to participants. That’s not the way to good writing. Good writing takes it’s time to form and evolve, and isn’t bound by a set word count.
Good writing deserves a space on the calendar to be celebrated, and to show writers that it’s not how much you do, but how good what you do is. So perhaps we need a National Good Writing Month – a NaGoWriMo – instead?
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Please do let us know your thoughts – agree or disagree! – in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Pete Mayhem, The Best Of NaNoWriMo Tumblr and ExtremeTech/The Simpsons.
Robert Smedley is a TV Reviewer and Writer. When not staring at moving images or being creative with ink, he can be found at any bar that serves a good martini.
I couldn’t disagree anymore, but I don’t think you’ve probably ever participated in NaNoWriMo. I’m under the impression that unless you’ve tried something, you probably should not be judging it.
Now as to the points that you’ve made here:
I don’t know a single writer amongst my friends that treat NaNoWriMo as a competition. Because it is not that at all. It’s about taking those long-thought about ideas in your head and putting them down onto paper. It’s about finally finishing the novel you’ve always wanted to write but never made time for. It’s about learning how to write a full novel without over-thinking it (to the point that it never gets written). I wrote my first novel with the program and continue to participate every year.
As far as creating bad habits, NaNoWriMo most certainly is not about creating a novel with the first draft (or the zero draft, as a friend of mine calls it). It’s just about getting ideas down on paper. There will be a lot of typos and grammatical errors, but that’s what the re-writing process is for. In re-writing, you take those ideas and you start to form and shape them. Maybe this doesn’t work for a lot of writers, but it does work for me and many others.
Also, I’m not sure where you’re finding NaNoWriMo participants, but everyone I’ve come across is very enthused when they hit that 50,000 word mark. Because it means that they’ve finally made the commitment to write and they now have found a foundation for that first novel. For me, it was one of the best feelings in the world.
I think you would also be surprised at how many good books do come out of NaNoWriMo. Some have had quite a bit of success as self-published books. Many of these books eventually get featured on the NaNoWriMo blog, so I suggest you do some research before making some of these claims.
In the end, I think you’ve missed the whole point of the program and I would ask that you look at it again and maybe even participate one year so that you can back your opinions up with actual facts.
For me, personally, NaNoWriMo helped me finally commit to being a writer and I’ve since been able to, more or less, quit my day job (as a freelance web developer) and write full-time (I contract out to various websites). That also gives me time to work on novels and participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. NaNoWriMo taught me some important lessons, especially about taking time every day just to write (so many writers never even get this far) and taught me that sometimes writing off the top of your head can give you a pretty darn amazing story.
Too many writers overthink. I know several who have been planning and plotting their books for years and yet have not written a single word. NaNoWriMo seeks to take that out of their process and just get them to typing. Because as a good friend once told me “You’re not a writer until you write.”
My comment is much longer than I expected, so I am sorry for the long read. But NaNoWriMo is a program I obviously care deeply about. And I will participate every year for as long as I am able, as well as donate to the program.
Hi Robin! Thanks for taking the time to comment. Fortunately I have tried it (several years ago back when I was studying Creative Writing) and, much like Thai food and Downton Abbey, quickly found out it just wasn’t something for me. Now that’s just my personal experience, just as this was my personal view. I have friends who do it every year and love it. Indeed, one just self-published a book that they wrote during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t just come in to this article swinging a scythe and blindly waving it in the direction of something I didn’t understand.
I’m a writer as my day job, and I’m all for things that get people writing. It’s why I write for this site. I think it’s great that NaNo has helped you commit to your passion for writing, but not everyone who participates in NaNo has your level-headed approach. Not everyone re-writes and edits once the month is over.
As I said in the article, a few will indeed be good and a few will get published. I don’t disagree with you on that point. There are some really talented people out there. But there are also a lot of not very talented people, and I think where NaNo lets them down is that everyone is so enthused about writing that novel in a month, about hitting the word count, getting the thoughts on paper, encouraging and not critiquing each other, that a frenzy of excitement builds up and no one stops to say ‘Okay, so we’re writing. But are we writing well?’. You’re not a writer until you write. You’re not a good writer until you stop and think about what it is you’re writing, and I don’t think the short space of time that is November gives people the time to stop and think.
But it’s all a matter of differing enthusiasms in the end, and even though I disagree with what you say, it’s great that you and others are passionate about writing. It’s why were all on this site after all.
I would argue that NaNoWriMo is not about creating “good writers” – just about creating writers. In fact, the very format of it _dis_courages stopping to think, as you point out. My impression is that many people use it as a way to give themselves a kick start, or to get them in the groove of daily writing, or just to say once that they “wrote a novel.”
Others of us have different reasons for participating. As for me, this is my first time, and I just crossed 50k words today (though I’m about a chapter and a half from the end of my story). NaNoWriMo has given me the kick in the pants necessary to get this story out my skull, after it has lurked there incomplete for nearly a decade. BUT – I am under absolutely no illusions that this is a complete novel. Frankly, it’s kind of crap. That is, there are pieces I’m proud of, and it has a lot of potential, but it needs months of hard work to hone it into anything worthy of showing to my friends, let alone strangers.
I think perhaps that’s where you and Robin are disagreeing. In your favor, yes – NaNoWriMo produces a lot of crappy writing, and perhaps a great number of crappy writers. In her favor, NaNoWriMo produces some decent first attempts that writers serious about becoming good (or at least better) writers can use as a starting point for that better work.
So I suppose it depends on how you (or anyone else) view NaNoWriMo’s purpose. And, as you say, for those for whom it works, it’s a fine vehicle.
I can completely understand that point of view. NaNo produces a veritable typhoon of horrendous genre trash and fanfic. I shudder to think of all the superfluous adjectives and poorly considered adverbs, no doubt describing some alien vampire succubus pirate.
For a few years I participated in the exercise, even served as the Municipal Liaison for Seoul a few times. I no longer do either. Four years in a row, I hit the 50,000 word mark. They were not good words. But, doing them did accomplish a few things.
One, it let me do what Natalie Goldberg might call ‘burning out the dead leaves’ or whatever metaphor she used in Writing Down the Bones. These were story ideas that almost certainly didn’t need or deserve the ‘real’ writing process, but which were littering my mind and had to be written down to clear them.
Two, it helped me exercise a few creative muscles. Trying different voices and points of view, kooky conceits, weird characters, that sort of thing. The deadline makes stories simpler (in my case, anyway), forcing you to make choices about which paths to follow, rather than having the leisure to wend your way through each interesting trail. That could be hit or miss, I suppose. For me I think it was helpful.
And three, it drilled daily writing discipline into my brain. No one but you and maybe your writing buddy care at all if you hit your goal. Surprisingly, that’s enough to keep some of us working. That’s great. Being able to drive yourself to write with only you as the taskmaster is, I think, an important trait to develop.
But, once you develop it, I can’t see much reason to keep doing NaNo unless the local community is a lot of fun. The last two years I did it here in Seoul was entirely because it was fun to meet the gang every couple three days for write-ins and all-nighters and drinking.
So, more power to all the NaNo’ers out there. I hope they get something out of it. Just don’t ask me to read anything from it.
Thanks for such an insightful comment Chris (I especially like the ‘burning out the dead leaves’ – I hadn’t thought of that). I think if more people treated NaNo as you have then it would be a far more worthwhile endeavour, rather than the word race it feels like at the minute.
It was awesome to find my 2009 Flickr desktop here in the morning while visiting my favorite sites. I’m still doing NaNoWriMo too. This site is a fantastic resource. I’ve been collecting my favorite articles to share with other struggling writers in a shared Evernote notebook. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for your lovely comment Pete – glad we could be of assistance!
I agree and disagree. This is the first time I’ve even written anything of this size and quite frankly I expect it to be pure shite, but I can also say there are some moments with some real potential in there. NaNo gave me this opportunity to do this, an achievable goal to work towards(although I doubt I will hit it). I have noticed many of these fan fiction kids, other people with overly flouncy prose and people that only really write during this time of the year…this, is a shame. I myself will be spending January rewriting my NaNo into something that is half readable and maybe after two more rewrites, readable by other people.
Hi Paul! Sounds like you’re approaching NaNo in the way I think more people should, namely using the month as a push to start writing and then go back and refine what you’ve done in the following months. Too many people treat it as a month to write as much as possible and then think that their work is done just because the month’s over.
Thanks for your comment and best of luck with the rewriting!
I thought NaNo would help me structure my time, motivate me, and I would get some support from the writers’ community. I didn’t think I’d produce a novel, by any means, but I didn’t think I’d produce drek, either. What I hoped to get was a running start on an idea I had for a novella.
What I have learned is that NaNo-style is not how I write. I tend to do a bunch of research, mull things over, write in a burst, and then not do much for a bit, although I think about it every day, rinse and repeat. Daily word wars produce nothing for me much, and then only when a particular word sprint prompt happens to spark an idea that’s germane, and that takes place almost coincidentally and at no higher frequency than daily living, reading, observation, and ordinary conversations with friends produce ideas.
But most of all, I think I regret the time this month that I’ve taken away from my main project. I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.
For what it’s worth, I’m glad you decided to write this article, despite the possibility of becoming a pariah. And so far you seem to be faring well. Well played, sir.
I recently came to the same conclusion you did. I started NaNoWriMo this year with a story that I was ready to knock out of the park. I knew my characters, the plot, the theme, etc. After the first couple of days the brakes locked up. The story that had been so vivid faded like a dream. I knew I had it, but where did it go?
Then I noticed how much focus was on the word count, as opposed to the story. Making it to 1667 words per day was killing the work. There is enough opposition and distractions to keep me from the page (or blank screen) without adding an additional arbitrary limit to get in the way.
This got me to thinking about previous NaNoWriMo I participated in: ‘09 & ‘10. I “won” both. And by winning I mean I got to 50,000 words, saved the file, closed my laptop and never looked back. Both novels, and I use that word for lack of a better term, are utter shite. The ideas I had when I started them were good, but the end results were not worth the space they take up on my backup drive. This is why I never went back to them, nor will I. I don’t want this to happen again.
For all the good NaNoWriMo did in getting me to write, it did more damage by turning me away from writing. I had won by creating heinous mental diarrhea? (That sounds stupid.) The only joy that came from winning was not having to write any longer. (Huh?) And I’ll be damned if I’ll ever share any of that tripe. (That’s not an endorsement you’ll see quoted on the NaNoWriMo site.)
Other’s that I’ve participated with have had the same experience. Camaraderie with other miserable writers be damned. I think I’ll just write the old fashioned way.
So, I’m with you. NaNoWriMo is more disruptive than helpful. I’m willing to admit that this might be the case because I’m a hack. Also, I’m not going on an offensive to try to dissuade people from trying. Quite to the contrary, I will likely suggest that every writer try it once. It might be exactly what they need, and that’s great. But more likely than not, I think it will serve to teach what activities are not worth doing, like writing workshops and/or drug and alcohol abuse.
I am a fan of NaNoWriMo and thought your comments were too negative. I agree that some (I have no sense of how many) participants are too willing to share their product on December 1st. I think those people miss the point of the exercise.
I was one of those with an idea percolating in my head for a year. NaNoWriMo gave me the impetus to finally bang out a first (of many, I expect) draft. I am looking forward to the revision process in a month or so.
Perhaps the people at the Office of Letters and Light can do more to emphasize that 50,000 words written in 30 days is never ready to be shared – with anyone – on the 31st day.
NaNoWriMo can be a useful exercise in letting go of the inner editor that prevents you from writing a first, imperfect draft or it can be that exercise in self-indulgence from which the professionals in the publishing world are already fleeing.
Speaking of fan fiction, your monkey comment reminded me of a line from Supernatural:
“Endings are hard. Any chapped-ass monkey with a keyboard can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible…” So…monkeys. Fan fic. There’s a motif…
I’m not a writer by trade; I have a full time job, and a family. What nanowrimo does for me is make me commit to something. When you have a lot of other things on your plate, it’s simple for writing to fall to the bottom, especially if there’s no real consequence. I’m not going to lose any money, and no one, other than me, cares whether I finish or not. By making a public commitment, seeing actual progress, I feel like I have a little push behind me that gets me up an hour earlier every day, or keeps me writing at lunchtime instead of socializing.
This year I followed the advice of a couple of other bloggers, Janice Hardy and Larry Brooks, and actually planned out my novel, beginning to end. I’m not a planner by nature but having a guideline, and a time commitment, and a growing word count gives me impetus to try to get to 50,000 words in thirty days.
Will I make it? Likely not, since I’m not quite to 25,000 but I do have a full head of steam, and a story unfolding in front of me. And that’s more than I had in October.
I’m using NANO to unblock a section of my manuscript. I assume a significant portion of what I’m writing will be discarded or edited and combined with other portions of the 50,000 words. I’m working on a memoir that covers a healing journey from abuse. It touches on time in the occult and then will end with finding real healing through Christianity. The people in a writing group I was involved in were not Christians and felt that the Christianity part of my story was “eye candy for Christians.” They loved the sections dealing with the abuse and my time in various occult groups, but don’t like Christians too much. Each time I tried to write the counseling sessions with the pastor who helped me sort out my life, I was stymied. By doing NANO I’m able to get the dialogue down and can decide what will be most effective for telling my story.
I have to admit, before this blockage in my writing I sort of thought of NANO the same way you do, but now have a different perception.
NNWM is what one makes of it. Some may think of it as competition, friendly or not.
This is my first try at NNWM. I thought it would serve me well as a structured discipline to get my new story off the ground. Good writing is all about the revisions anyway, so my goal is to get my basic plot, characters and scene sequences down on paper in a defined amount of time. I’ll take plenty of time after November to revise, improve, tighten, all the good stuff that turns an okay story into a great one.
I’m only competing with myself this month. I look at other writers’ word count progress more as proof that 50K words can be written in 30 days and motivation for me to keep plugging. But I certainly see how many writers can be sucked into the competition trap of quantity over quality.
Whatever works, and NNWM at least motivates thousands of writers to follow the best writing advice of all: “Butt in chair, write every day.”
I don’t think it’s fair to generalize every participant. I personally had a hard time trying to write something good, last week for three days I just wrote 1000 words. And I was about to give up, but I decided to give it a last try. The words just started flowing and I managed to write 10,000 on the weekend. I’m not the kind of person that would write something bad just for the sake of winning, I don’t think I could even if I wanted. And I’ve known other people that have the same mentality about NaNoWriMo.
For me NaNo was good writing practice. I never thought I could write more than 1000 words a day, words I would be proud to write at least, but I learned I could.
I got rid of bad habits instead of gaining them. I criticize my own works a lot, I need to write something I like and that I think people would like, or else I would just lose interest. So while I’m writing I also take the position of a reader, and during this month I found dozens of annoying things about the way I used to write that I tried to improve, and now looking back to the first 10,000 words, I’ve improved incredibly.
I can see why you hate NaNoWriMo. At first I thought the same about another mexican WriMos writing manga fanfictions or novels about Justin Bieber and One Direction. There was also a guy posting tools name and plot generators. Why were they wasting their time? I later met some serious writers, two of them were even published and did NaNo just for fun and if something good came out, well… That would be great.
I’m just trying to say NaNo is different for everyone, and if you hate fanfiction writers just don’t write fanfiction and try to write something good on that month. After all, the only prize is just self-satisfaction. I had a great time writing through this month, and I also had really hard times. But I finished something I’m proud of, so it’s not about the online goodies you get or that you can brag you won. I finished writing the first draft of a novel, and that’s how every writer starts. That’s the important thing for me.
I completely understand your point of view, in fact I still have it… but only to an extent. Like with all things, NaNoWriMo is what one makes of it. The way it’s advertised of course lures the masses who fancied they could write the next big thing. All they needed was a reason (be it a competition, community, or deadline). And to that end I totally agree. Although I’m a new writer I’ve always opted to never partake, because as you pointed out this popularization of the writting process reduces it to some feeding frenzy in which no one appreciates the legitimate process (and struggles) of writing from one’s deepest inner-essence.
Conversely, I know people, both mature and inexperienced who have partaken in NaNoWriMo and used it as a spring board. Some of them tweak it, I was actually considering adapting one of my friend’s practices for the month without partaking formally. Some of them literally follow NaNoWriMo’s program verbatim, see what they get, then put their work through more formal and more rigorous processes.
The program could greatly stand to be improved, maybe if there were a component year round (before November) that was dedicated to fostering a creator’s mindset, so to speak, it would be a far more holistic process for those new writers who are attracted to the event.