I've seen a lot of people commenting last month on the fact they were on the NaNoWriMo treadmill again. If there's anyone left in the universe who doesn't know what this is, the goal of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is held annually every November, is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel in just one month. Does that sound like a tight schedule to you? it would be if you were deeply passionate about the standard of what you were writing, but the joy of NaNoWriMo is that you can write absolute crap* as long as you produce those 50,000 words before midnight on November 30. You can probably even write 'crap' 50,000 times and call yourself a NaNoWriMo winner.

This is official. "Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly....Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing." (from the NaNoWriMo website).

Yeah, I know its all a bit tongue in cheek - at least I assume it is meant to be deliberately absurd because it would be scary otherwise *chuckles*. But to hear some people obsessing about their DUTY to bang out their average of 1,666⅔ words per day and lamentations of guilt if they fall short, I think many take it way too seriously. And I think I'm still missing the whole point. Why is writing crap a good thing? Does cheerfully churning out crap magically teach one how to write well, or just instill bad writing habits?

I see that it might offer an incentive to start writing something, and since it's only perseverence and stamina that's required to participate in NaNoWriMo rather than the faintest niggle of talent or quality, it might offer encouragement to those who would love to call themselves writers but don't want to bother actually studying the craft. No, writing 50,000 words of dross won't make anyone a real novelist. To suggest it might is insulting to the professionals who've worked hard to earn the right to call themselves a novelist. "Aiming low is the best way to succeed," burbles the FAQ on the NaNoWriMo website. Really? I wonder how many professionals in any discipline would seriously advocate that approach.

And what of the concept of writing because something inside your head or heart is burning to be articulated? Where is the fun? You'd think that as a past distance runner I'd understand the satisfaction of completing a long, hard slog, of doing something just so you can say you did it . But maybe I was just more of a masochist in those days, because now I'd take more satisfaction in a carefully crafted 500-word post for one of my collaberative fiction stories than in wasting the time I could have been doing that on writing 1,666⅔ words of which 1,000 are probably redundant filler to achieve the magic target.

No.... I don't wish to sneer at NaNoWriMo writers, in fact I possibly even admire their cockeyed persistence and I gallantly cheer on those few participants I know to hit their goal. Maybe they get a big kick out of it. But it's not for me. The self-professed object of the exercise is "to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work". Mock me if you like, but I'll still rather be counted amongst those dawdling on and on in the vague hope of attaining some kind of quality.