What’s the Point of NaNoWriMo?

Edit: I posted this yesterday in my browser of choice, Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer. For some reason, this meant that it cut off the bottom of the page disallowing comments. I am reposting it in IE and deleting the other entry. OD’s functions are less than, shall we say, optimal. -Oliver

One day in 1995, I began drawing an awesome map of a land called Enarda. This was about the time I invented my own language, which I called Vidda.
A map like that couldn’t just go unused, so I began thinking up stories I could set there. I sat down one day and started, at the age of thirteen, to write a short story, which I titled The Battle of Kordulgë Bridge. It was about a young recruit Volunïecë, who went southwards towards the strategic Kordulgë Bridge, to make a stand against the invading goblin army headed their way. The story turned out to be 5,582 words (13 pages). This seemed a lot to me, especially since I wrote it with a pen on notebook paper.
Later the same year, I set out on an even bigger writing project, beginning a story which I titled Dethyvon. It was about a knight on a quest, stealing a good deal of plot points from The Lord of the Rings. I abandoned it two years later as a manuscript of 17,775 words (74 pages). I left Dethyvon walking down a faint trail north-east towards the strange island of Nith, with the elf Kantela as a guide, where he has been ever since.
I turned to writing poetry. I figured that short poems were easier to finish. No big word requirements. No plot, no story arcs, no pleasing the reader. I wrote poems often, amassing 400 by the end of 2005. I set a goal of writing 100 poems during 2006, because I wanted to break 500. After I did, I stopped writing poetry so much.
My longest story I’d ever written was Dethyvon, which I hadn’t touched since I was fourteen. I’ve always felt the need to write, but felt like I couldn’t get past the hurdle of surpassing 17,775 words. I felt stuck.
In 2001, I started my first online diary and changed my major to English. I started to write a lot more, to fulfill a desire to write, and as a matter of necessity. I wrote 51 papers in college. (I counted once.)
So by the time 2003 came, I was twenty-one years old and I’d written my longest manuscript when I was thirteen, and it wasn’t even finished. I felt like a writing failure. I was embarrassed.
I remember once my roommate at the time, Katie, was talking about her friend. “She writes books,” Katie was saying. “I mean, books. More than 200 pages.”
Katie sounded so impressed, and I felt stabs of jealousy. I didn’t even know Katie’s friend, but I wanted to be that person, the person who could write book-length manuscripts that spanned more than 200 pages.
In 2003, I began writing a story called Sleepless during a period when I suffered from heavy depression. The plot was mostly suicide ideation, about a guy who killed himself and turned into a ghost. It dwindled out at 8,547 words/33 pages and I abandoned it a year later.
In 2004, I began another writing project, which involved a lot of planning and procrastinating. I made an awesome map, researched cultures and language, and wrote a whole plot outline. It was going to be an epic involving a battle between two nations. I’d tackle such things as gay rights, love, slavery, sex equality. It was based on Homer’s Illiad. I titled it The Aethiald. It turned out to be 27,867 words (99 pages), although it was so fragmented that I never knew I had so much material.
In a bookstore in 2005, I accidentally encountered No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty. I consumed it with eager relish. Chris Baty is the guy who first formed the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 1999. I felt inspired by his book. I felt like I could get over the writing hump, that I could break my former record I’d set as a kid. I could write a novel.
NaNoWriMo combines two things: 1) fixed goals in the form of writing a certain amount of words (generally speaking, 1,667 a day) and 2) a fixed deadline, 30 days. There are a few other rules, such as it has to be fiction, you can’t start before November 1, and you have to end by November 30.
I decided to dispense with several of the rules, namely the month of November. I read the book in July, and I wanted to get started. So I decided that August 1, 2005, would be the day I started my novel. A novel that would actually be 50,000 words. It’d break my old record and I could consider myself someone who had the chops to actually write something book-length. I was going to do it on my own terms, in my own month.
I finished my first novel, Imagine, twenty-eight days later. 51,245 words (202 pages). It was about a diabetic wizard apprentice. The feeling as I wrote “The End” after the crazy month of writing furiously had changed me. I was no longer beholden to my unfinished stories that would never be books. I’d actually written something that was long enough. It was a shitty book and I had no intention to submit it for publication. I’d written it to prove that I could write a book-length story. As I cracked my celebratory Guinness, I sat down and the floor and breathed out a long, long sigh of sweet relief.
The next year I got the writing bug again after a particularly vivid dream, and began my next novel August 1, 2006 and ended twenty-eight days later. It was my one and only romance novel, and my favorite. Neno Riun was about a woman named Penelope who needed a heart transplant. She travels to an Irish castle called Neno Riun, where she plans to spend her last year of her life. Instead, she finds unexpected love. (Incidentally, my dog Penny is named after Neno Riun’s protagonist.)
The year after that, I wrote The Baneful Courier, a sci-fi romp about a hit man who has to deliver a package on another planet. I absolutely biffed the ending on it though, and never have figured out what a proper ending should have been for the plot. I wrote it in two months, January 2 through February 25, 2007. Nevertheless, I got 51,122 words (200 pages) from it and didn’t return to fix the end.
Later in the year, I started a non-fiction project, my thoughts about religion and philosophy. I worked on this on and off for a few years, ending up with 28,621 words (99 pages).
In 2008 I took a break from writing novels. Instead, I moved to Tucson and started a new job.
<div style="margin:0in 0in 10pt”>2010 found me wanting to return to sci-fi, so I wrote Saving Perseid in my first actual NaNoWriMo, spanning November 3 to November 29, 2010 at 50,099 words (161 pages).
And finally, last year I turned into a NaNoWrimo rebel and wrote my autobiography, Hedera, which was neither fiction nor was it entirely written during November. I stole from my diary, letters, and my manuscript about religion and philosophy. But it ended up 50,718 words (95 pages). I had no intention to write this to be published either. I actually wrote it for my future children, so I could show them who I was, how I got here, and what I thought about important things.
To get to the point, if I have one: [hoops] wrote an entry yesterday titled August & Everything After *Anti-NaNoWriMo in which he argued that NaNoWriMo “does more harm than good.”
As evidence, he points to a newspaper article that mentioned that over 90 books began as NaNoWriMo projects, which is dismally low compared to the more than 100,000 annual participants. “This is an absolute failure,” [hoops] said.
[hoops] also said that he calls bullshit on anyone wanting to write a novel just to have written a novel, to “just hit SAVE and move on to some other hobby, like underwater basket weaving.”
I responded thusly:
I’ve participating in Nano a number of years without the aim of getting anything published (despite your calling bullshit). It did, however, build my confidence as a writer, knowing that I could actually produce book-length manuscripts that actually finish with "The End." I think the success of Nano is that many writers need goals and deadlines to be motivated enough to actually produce something.
For evidence, see above.
[hoops] responded to my note:
ryn: First of all, I respect your opinions even if I don’t agree with them. Reasonable people can agree to disagree. For the life of me, I cannot imagine why someone would commit so much effort to writing a book that they did not want to publish, but if you say that’s what you did, I’ll accept that without understanding it. As for the success of writing for distance–I see a point there, I suppose, but it also seems like an odd way to run a race. You take the final hurdle first and then go back to jump all of the previous ones, in my opinion.

But let me ask you this: As someone who has done this project and written to a word limit every day, don’t you think you’d have been better off writing for a set amount of time every day, not to a specific word limit and expanding your project beyond 1 month to the more typical 3-6 that most professional writers take to write a book? What does writing a book in a month do for you? I just don’t understand that.

And thanks for the feedback. I’m always open to some good discourse.
So all this gets down to putting down my thoughts about NaNoWriMo. I think [hoops] is right: the ratio of 90 published books vs. 100,000 participants a year is dismal, if you think that all of the participants are writing with the intent to get a novel they can have published. I think the ratio is clear evidence to the contrary, that most participants do not write novels in a month with the aim of being a published author. (I mean “published” in the same sense that [hoops] did, from a known publishing house, and not self-published, print-on-demand, or e-published somehow.)
I can’t speak to other participants’ motivations, although I suspect they include some of the ones that [hoops] blithely dismissed, such as writing just to have written a novel. Perhaps it doesn’t earn others’ esteem, but it certainly does a little something for one’s own confidence. Writing a novel in a month is good practice. The more you practice writing, the better you get at it, and putting oneself through a grueling one-month routine is one way to build experience.
[hoops]’s other main criticism is that “NaNoWriMo requires nothing more than discipline,” but that it doesn’t hone skills as practice, because it’s just focused on word count instead of content.
I think this could be true and false simultaneously. I think the novels from NaNoWriMo can indeed be terrible first drafts, and they aren’t going to be of the same caliber as someone who painstakingly wrote a novel using all the skill they have to bear upon it. Some of the best novels were written not in months, but in decades.
However, I think it does hone skills to write. As I mentioned previously, I think some people just need a kick in the pants with set goal and a deadline. If they didn’t have an absolute goal, they wouldn’t get the novel done. They’d remaining thinking “Oh, I wish I could be like an author and write something that long.”
After completing something novel-length, however shitty, it gets the writer past that. They can produce novel-length manuscripts. Maybe the next project they should set is for a novel done in two months. Three months. Something more reasonable. But the self-doubting is gone.
As for honing skills, I think writing 50,000 words in a month hones skills. How could it not? Faced with that hard a challenge, you have to face your fears, develop a voice, make snap judgments, and let the words flow. After writing a novel-length manuscript or two, you don’t find it as daunting a task as it once was, and you find that you’ve developed your own voice.
So what does writing a novel in a month do for me in particular? I found my writing legs doing NaNoWriMo. Now that I’ve written five novel-length manuscripts (and three book-length training manuals for work, for that matter), I feel like I can write however long a manuscript if I want to write, without being haunted by the doubting voices of my past.
[hoops]’s criticisms of NaNoWriMo producing paltry literary value are true, though—I quite agree. The point of NaNoWriMo isn’t to produce publishable drafts, though. I’ve criticized my own works as needing a good editor with a red pen.
In the words of Chris Baty:
 It’s not just shit, though. It’s wonderful shit. A first draft is an anything-goes space for you to roll up your sleeves and make a terrific mess. It is a place where the writer’s battle plan is redrawn daily; a place where recklessness and risk-taking is rewarded, where half-assed planning and tangential writing can yield unexpectedly amazing results. It is, in short, a place for people like you and me.