NaNoWriMo, a Literary Feast of Fools?

No Plot! No Problem!
Or as the Guinness guys shout: Brilliant!
Or is it: No clue!

What is NaNoWriMo? A great surge of literary energy? Or a Feast of Fools? From their website:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline. . . . They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

This NaNoWriMo blog has lots of positive anecdotal stories:

Every year of NaNo, I feel like a winner, just for taking time for myself to do something I love, and to do it intensely.

I agree that Writing, for a lot of us, means taking the time, finding that core of passion, and dealing with the intensity of the process. Personally, I find ways to motivate myself (here are 6 of them), like grabbing a glass of red wine and telling myself “I’ll just write for 15 minutes.”

Writing often seems a solitary struggle: man/woman against the blank page of infinite possibilities. We all need writing buddies, real and virtual.

So I understand that for some, the cheerleading and sense of community of NaNoWriMo gets the writer’s blood pounding and fingers flying on the keyboard.

Personally, I recommend a more steady, stick-to-it approach. For most, 500 words a day and a good 3-month plan will get you further than an intense November.

As an editor of books of advice for writers, I’ve studied for years the techniques of successful authors of all genres and approaches. Only a few (Georges Simenon, Belgian author of the Maigret crime novels) comes to mind as ones who did anything like NaNoWriMo. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Simenon says “Typing some 80 pages each day, he wrote, between 1923 and 1933, more than 200 books of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, the sales of which soon made him a millionaire.” Zounds!

This story about Simenon is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock:

Alfred Hitchcock was said to have telephoned, only to be told by Simenon’s secretary that [Simenon]e couldn’t be disturbed because he had just begun a new novel. Hitchcock replied: “That’s all right, I’ll wait.”

Here’s another Simenon story:

What brought Simenon . . . to the attention of the public was not so much his skill as his extraordinary energy as a writer.  . . .So notorious did his speed of composition become, that on 14th January 1927 he signed a contract with publisher Eugène Merle undertaking to spend seven days in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub, during which time he would write a novel which was subsequently to be serialised in Merle’s newspaper, Paris-Matinal.

(The paper folded before the event took place, but Simenon kept the advance and enjoyed the media interest for the planned stunt.)

So . . . I can’t say the intensity of NaNoWriMo, or being locked in a glass cage for seven days outside a night club to write, will do any serious harm to a writer. Most will probably build up at least some ideas, passages, maybe self-confidence (or not), maybe some progress on a project.

But that’s a lot of energy to spend on something that’s better training for pulp fiction than for most writing aspirations.

My November challenge: ask yourself, honestly, what really works for you? Not what is fun, or a literary adrenalin rush, or a heightened sense of community, or the power of an oath of commitment (good things in moderation). . . . but what is really going to advance your writing?

For some, NaNoWriMo is going to be the trick that works. No problem! But then . . . what’s your plan for the next three months, and beyond?

As I said in my Afterword to The New Writer’s Handbook, Vol. 2, “One of the oddities of the writing world is that it allows you – in some ways glorifies the tendency – to continue in fruitless ways. To grow as a writer, be more honest about evaluating what works.”