Listen to the soup.Normally, I welcome the coming of autumn with excitement and elation. Most all of my memorable romances began in the fall (who wants to spend the winter alone?), and the prospects of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the coming of Christmas are enough to quicken the most jaded of pulses. Yet over the past few years, the month of November has caused me increasing amounts of aggravation and anxiety and I place the blame squarely on
NaNoWriMo.
For those unfamiliar with
National
Novel
Writing
Month, it is an annual challenge accessible to anyone 13 years of age or older to write a 50,000 word novel in one month (November). I havenever attempted the challenge issued by NaNoWriMo mostly because I find the goal to be completely arbitrary and bereft of any actual achievement. A description of the challenge, taken from NaNoWriMo's website,
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. ... In 2005, we had over 59,000 participants. Nearly 10,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.By this logic, one could start taking boxing classes at a local gym, fight their way up from obscurity, earn a title bout with
Manny Pacquiao (Pacman The Destroyer) and then- after years of training and dedication- call themselves a Professional Boxer... orrrrrrrrrrr they could simply walk into a bar, punch Pacquaio in the face, have the living shit beaten out of them, and emerge from the hospital not as a pretentious status-seeker but rather, as a Professional Boxer. Calling yourself a novelist after completing the NaNoWriMo challenge is an insult to actual writers who focus their efforts on their craft to improve as artists.
But worse than the "I'm a novelist!" goal of NaNoWriMo itself is the fact that its "painstaking craft"-free enthusiasts are among the most affected and insufferable self-obsessed artistes that you will ever have the displeasure of encountering. Most all of them- to the artiste- will crow and fixate on their "novels" to the point that they become incapable of even pronouncing the word properly.
"Naaaahvel", they'll drawl, as if they were a speech-impaired castoff of the Hepburn family,
"I'm writing my naaaahvel." This dialectic shift occurs not as a result of their progress and maturation as an actual writer, but rather as a symptom of their misguided hope that their participation in this challenge will somehow set them apart from the rest of the brilliant, unique snowflakes in the world.
Criticism aside, the underlying premise of NaNoWriMo is honorable enough... and encouraging the hoi polloi to write is a laudable task, but the problem with arbitrary goals (50,000 words = naaaahvel) is that it provides potential participants with a question of whether or not they
can do something while training them to ignore the question of whether or not they
should do something. A case in point: I
can stick my penis into a sock full of rats and thumbtacks, but that I
shouldn't and thus avoid the hype of NaPenSoRaTaMo.
...although, now that I put some thought into it, I realize I'm not entirely sure how many rats one can fit into a a given sock and- for that matter- what sort of sock (and rat!) we are using for the working definition. As you can see, this clearly merits further consideration, and so- too- should your reasons for participating in NaNoWriMo: If you're doing it as an exercise to help your personal aspirations of writing, then by all means go to town.
But if you're undertaking the challenge for the opportunity to take sepia-tone pictures of yourself in non-prescription glasses hard at work in front of your naaaahvel just so you can post visual evidence of your progress on your social media site of choice, I would like to remind you that there are far, far easier ways to be branded an insufferably pretentious douchebag...
(Writing for Kawaiian Punch being the easiest. 717 words in this post, 49,283 to go!)
