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quillpunkThis got ridiculously long, so behind a cut it goes.
Alright. So I've done NaNoWriMo a few times, even won once or twice, and yet after some mucking about on the internet and reading some things I'm having some doubts. Not necessarily about NaNoWriMo as a community (largely because I'm not really a part of that and don't particularly care one way or another) but rather as to its actual usefulness for somebody who wants a career as an author.
Because writing is just constant practice.
I've read Micheal Warren Lucas' book about improving ones writing skill via deliberate practice (very much recommend it!) and I agree with it. Getting better at writing means deliberately practicing. It's something I've been subconsciously all my life and now do deliberately (because as a self-taught writer whose first language is not English that's not something I had the language for before); I write a project with one thing in mind I know I need to improve on, and I come out the other end better at that thing because I actually practiced it. Then I pick another thing I'm weak on and I go into the next project paying extra attention and working specifically hard on *that* one thing. And so and so forth.
Deliberate practice. Honestly, it's not a big deal. It's really just paying extra attention to something.
So my question, then, is; what do you *actually* practice when doing NaNoWriMo?
Aside from finishing things, which is very much a skill that needs practice so please know I'm not knocking using NaNoWriMo for that, but aside from *that*, what are you practicing? What are you deliberately doing to improve your craft? What are you paying attention to?
Sucking, right? You are paying attention to the fact that your writing, quick and dirty, sucks.
So a while back I was trawling through the Draft Aftercare section on NaNoWriMo's forum because I wanted to see what kind of advise could be had, what kind of conversations were taking place, etc. I was gearing up to revise my own projects and editing is hell for me, so I wanted some company, basically. And I came across this thread. Now, at the time I basically agreed with the responses. Because it's fine to write trash, but actually putting trash out there for money in return is kind of a shitty thing to do, right? It's common decency not to, right?
But in hindsight, with some time and some introspection and some reading (which actually I hadn't intended to do, I started pondering about NaNoWriMo for an unrelated reason which I will expand on later), I do think the responses are kind of telling. Why is the assumption that this person's writing sucks? Why is the automatic gut-reaction to *tell* him his writing sucks -- without even knowing who he is?
Well, because things written during NaNoWriMo are, in general, of rather poor quality. That's just the natural result of not *caring* about quality. And it's an understood fact; you can't publish a thing written for NaNoWriMo without hefty revision.
You skimped on the quality while writing it and now you've gotta pay the price, peasant.
...Why did you skimp on the quality, though?
This whole spiral of mine started with reading a post by Dean Wesley Smith about clean drafts. I have discovered that I absolutely hate editing; this is a recent discovery because despite writing regularly for over a decade, I've never actually edited anything. I am 100% serious; I didn't even edit school projects. (And I got an A in my writing class! Without editing!) Frankly, the fact that I don't edit things when I write for fun (like fanfiction), really should have told me something.
And after much pain, annoyance, and frustration, and still only managing to edit about 10k in half-a-year, I read that post. A person on Mastodon had linked it and I read it out of curiosity. And I went through the comments. And I thought; you mean I don't *have to* edit afterwards?
Because, truly, I hate it.
When my brain designates a thing as done, it's not distinguishing between drafts. The thing is just done. And then trying to work on it is actual pain. It's not fun, I don't enjoy it, and not a single part of me wants to do it. But, again, I can't very well ask money for an untouched first draft. I do have a smidgen of morality. Some editing *needs* to be done.
But NaNoWriMo, as a concept and a challenge, discards editing. It's not only an afterthought, it's outright a refusal. One can even think the challenge is not merely (though that's a pretty big 'merely') to write 50k words, it's also a challenge to *not care* about the quality of your own skill.
It's an exercise in loss.
(Side-note, there's nothing wrong with not caring about your skill level! But I specifically want a writing career; I want to be able to make money, ideally regularly, from writing stories. And for *that* goal, NaNoWriMo is a loss.)
Because what *are* you practicing when doing NaNoWriMo? What are you paying attention to?
That your writing sucks, right?
It's fine if something sucks, I told myself last November, "I'll fix it in editing". Spoiler: I did not fix it in editing. I have, in fact, not edited a single word. I'm kind of starting to panic about what this will do to the whole series if I'm dumping the first book. Which it looks like I'm doing.
*Ouch*.
Participating in NaNoWriMo not only sets the expectation that your writing for that project is trash -- it not only encourages it -- it downright orders you to write trash. The goal of NaNo is not to write a good book, it's to write fast and dirty. The goal *is* to 'not care'.
And that's fine in some contexts. It's even valuable sometimes; if your only goal is to finish a thing, then caring about the quality simply drags you down. It's just more hoops to jump through, more obstacles to evade.
So I am not saying NaNoWriMo is useless, or doesn't have a purpose. I'm not saying it's not helpful.
But writing is just eternal practice. It's putting one foot in front of the other, and nothing fancier than that. Every word you write is practice. Every sentence is an experiment; a new approach; the result and combination of thousands of hours of practice. For writing, the practice is both the point, the journey, the result, and the reason.
So what is NaNoWriMo teaching? What are you paying attention to? Going into NaNoWriMo with the expectation that your writing will be trash, that you'll need a hundred, two-hundred, more hours to revise it, that what you're doing now isn't even the tip of the ice berg, *what are you learning*?
"You writing is trash, by the way," NaNoWriMo laughs at you after you win.
(Sorry if that's mean, this post got long and I'm out of patience to censor myself. Wince.)
If you not only allow yourself to write trash but you *knowingly* write trash, what are you practicing but ignoring quality? What are you practicing other than to 'not care'? And sure some people care too much, some projects are too personally important and makes you worry too much, etc. but that is not what this post is about.
What are you practicing, other than 'how to write trash'?
...That feels like a good stopping point but I actually have a thing or two left to say, LOL. Because really, how does NaNoWriMo improve your writing if you are, at every step of the way, internalizing that your first drafts, the first bones in your stories, the ground upon which everything else must sit, is horrible shit. What can it possibly do besides lowering your standards on your first draft and raising your standards on every subsequent draft.
Because, also, if your first draft is trash, then the only way for the next draft to not be trash is to entirely rewrite it. That's what 'fixing everything in editing' means. Rewrite or perish, fool. You've boxed yourself into a corner where you knowingly wrote a thing that might really be unsalvageable, so the only way *to* salvage it is to completely redo it.
Pardon my language, but then why the hell did you write the thing in the first place?
(Side-note, every 'you' in this post is a nebulous 'you'. It's not directed at anybody specific. I'm not talking to or at anybody other than myself.)
More story-time; after reading DWS's post clean drafts, I read his book Writing into the Dark because I wanted more info about this 'cycling' thing. Because, as I said, editing is necessary and needs to get done one way or the other. And the way wasn't working for me, so off it was to find the other.
It didn't go into as much detail about the method as I wanted but then, that's not what the book is about. However, it was enough for me to decide to give it ago. Now, that experimental project is still in progress and anyway I'll need to repeat it multiple times for actual data, but so far... the editing part doesn't suck. I'm doing the exact same kind of editing as I'd do afterwards on a finished first draft, and yet the experience is completely different.
It's actually not painful! It's doable!
Halle-fucking-lujah. (No, really, this is a hallelujah moment.)
NaNoWriMo and its many, many participants outright tell you to ignore the quality of your work and instead do stupidly massive edits afterwards. It's not only expected that you'll need to rewrite your project, it's the norm. It's the sacrifice the challenge requires because otherwise 50k words in a month gets a lot harder, and if it's harder it's not as fun.
In writing community's online (by which I mean social medias and discord servers), at least from what I'd seen, "finish the draft first and worry about editing later" is the most common writing advice. And it sounds very professional, very logical, and I too raised a doubtful eyebrow whenever I saw somebody say that they do actually edit as they go.
There's a gut-reaction that editing as you write can't work. An instinctive response to shudder in horror. There's automatic *doubt*.
And if you edit as you write your NaNoWriMo project, there's outright disdain about your intelligence and your commitment to not only NaNoWriMo, but your project as well. There's an automatic assumption that you're ignorant not only of your own skill, but how writing works in general, and no hesitation in telling you so.
This has all been a very long-winded way to say that I'm having doubts about whether I want to do NaNoWriMo this month. My NaNo plan is kind of limbo right now and I'm left scratching my head.
I'm leaving you with the links that drove me down this rabbit hole. (And I do think it's funny my actual reasons for doubting NaNo aren't included in those articles.)
- Link 1: https://www.dystopic.co.uk/why-nanowrimo-is-bad-for-writers/
- Link 2: https://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2012/10/nanowrimo-good-bad-and-really-really_1.html
- Link 3: https://www.salon.com/2010/11/02/nanowrimo/
Alright. So I've done NaNoWriMo a few times, even won once or twice, and yet after some mucking about on the internet and reading some things I'm having some doubts. Not necessarily about NaNoWriMo as a community (largely because I'm not really a part of that and don't particularly care one way or another) but rather as to its actual usefulness for somebody who wants a career as an author.
Because writing is just constant practice.
I've read Micheal Warren Lucas' book about improving ones writing skill via deliberate practice (very much recommend it!) and I agree with it. Getting better at writing means deliberately practicing. It's something I've been subconsciously all my life and now do deliberately (because as a self-taught writer whose first language is not English that's not something I had the language for before); I write a project with one thing in mind I know I need to improve on, and I come out the other end better at that thing because I actually practiced it. Then I pick another thing I'm weak on and I go into the next project paying extra attention and working specifically hard on *that* one thing. And so and so forth.
Deliberate practice. Honestly, it's not a big deal. It's really just paying extra attention to something.
So my question, then, is; what do you *actually* practice when doing NaNoWriMo?
Aside from finishing things, which is very much a skill that needs practice so please know I'm not knocking using NaNoWriMo for that, but aside from *that*, what are you practicing? What are you deliberately doing to improve your craft? What are you paying attention to?
Sucking, right? You are paying attention to the fact that your writing, quick and dirty, sucks.
So a while back I was trawling through the Draft Aftercare section on NaNoWriMo's forum because I wanted to see what kind of advise could be had, what kind of conversations were taking place, etc. I was gearing up to revise my own projects and editing is hell for me, so I wanted some company, basically. And I came across this thread. Now, at the time I basically agreed with the responses. Because it's fine to write trash, but actually putting trash out there for money in return is kind of a shitty thing to do, right? It's common decency not to, right?
But in hindsight, with some time and some introspection and some reading (which actually I hadn't intended to do, I started pondering about NaNoWriMo for an unrelated reason which I will expand on later), I do think the responses are kind of telling. Why is the assumption that this person's writing sucks? Why is the automatic gut-reaction to *tell* him his writing sucks -- without even knowing who he is?
Well, because things written during NaNoWriMo are, in general, of rather poor quality. That's just the natural result of not *caring* about quality. And it's an understood fact; you can't publish a thing written for NaNoWriMo without hefty revision.
You skimped on the quality while writing it and now you've gotta pay the price, peasant.
...Why did you skimp on the quality, though?
This whole spiral of mine started with reading a post by Dean Wesley Smith about clean drafts. I have discovered that I absolutely hate editing; this is a recent discovery because despite writing regularly for over a decade, I've never actually edited anything. I am 100% serious; I didn't even edit school projects. (And I got an A in my writing class! Without editing!) Frankly, the fact that I don't edit things when I write for fun (like fanfiction), really should have told me something.
And after much pain, annoyance, and frustration, and still only managing to edit about 10k in half-a-year, I read that post. A person on Mastodon had linked it and I read it out of curiosity. And I went through the comments. And I thought; you mean I don't *have to* edit afterwards?
Because, truly, I hate it.
When my brain designates a thing as done, it's not distinguishing between drafts. The thing is just done. And then trying to work on it is actual pain. It's not fun, I don't enjoy it, and not a single part of me wants to do it. But, again, I can't very well ask money for an untouched first draft. I do have a smidgen of morality. Some editing *needs* to be done.
But NaNoWriMo, as a concept and a challenge, discards editing. It's not only an afterthought, it's outright a refusal. One can even think the challenge is not merely (though that's a pretty big 'merely') to write 50k words, it's also a challenge to *not care* about the quality of your own skill.
It's an exercise in loss.
(Side-note, there's nothing wrong with not caring about your skill level! But I specifically want a writing career; I want to be able to make money, ideally regularly, from writing stories. And for *that* goal, NaNoWriMo is a loss.)
Because what *are* you practicing when doing NaNoWriMo? What are you paying attention to?
That your writing sucks, right?
It's fine if something sucks, I told myself last November, "I'll fix it in editing". Spoiler: I did not fix it in editing. I have, in fact, not edited a single word. I'm kind of starting to panic about what this will do to the whole series if I'm dumping the first book. Which it looks like I'm doing.
*Ouch*.
Participating in NaNoWriMo not only sets the expectation that your writing for that project is trash -- it not only encourages it -- it downright orders you to write trash. The goal of NaNo is not to write a good book, it's to write fast and dirty. The goal *is* to 'not care'.
And that's fine in some contexts. It's even valuable sometimes; if your only goal is to finish a thing, then caring about the quality simply drags you down. It's just more hoops to jump through, more obstacles to evade.
So I am not saying NaNoWriMo is useless, or doesn't have a purpose. I'm not saying it's not helpful.
But writing is just eternal practice. It's putting one foot in front of the other, and nothing fancier than that. Every word you write is practice. Every sentence is an experiment; a new approach; the result and combination of thousands of hours of practice. For writing, the practice is both the point, the journey, the result, and the reason.
So what is NaNoWriMo teaching? What are you paying attention to? Going into NaNoWriMo with the expectation that your writing will be trash, that you'll need a hundred, two-hundred, more hours to revise it, that what you're doing now isn't even the tip of the ice berg, *what are you learning*?
"You writing is trash, by the way," NaNoWriMo laughs at you after you win.
(Sorry if that's mean, this post got long and I'm out of patience to censor myself. Wince.)
If you not only allow yourself to write trash but you *knowingly* write trash, what are you practicing but ignoring quality? What are you practicing other than to 'not care'? And sure some people care too much, some projects are too personally important and makes you worry too much, etc. but that is not what this post is about.
What are you practicing, other than 'how to write trash'?
...That feels like a good stopping point but I actually have a thing or two left to say, LOL. Because really, how does NaNoWriMo improve your writing if you are, at every step of the way, internalizing that your first drafts, the first bones in your stories, the ground upon which everything else must sit, is horrible shit. What can it possibly do besides lowering your standards on your first draft and raising your standards on every subsequent draft.
Because, also, if your first draft is trash, then the only way for the next draft to not be trash is to entirely rewrite it. That's what 'fixing everything in editing' means. Rewrite or perish, fool. You've boxed yourself into a corner where you knowingly wrote a thing that might really be unsalvageable, so the only way *to* salvage it is to completely redo it.
Pardon my language, but then why the hell did you write the thing in the first place?
(Side-note, every 'you' in this post is a nebulous 'you'. It's not directed at anybody specific. I'm not talking to or at anybody other than myself.)
More story-time; after reading DWS's post clean drafts, I read his book Writing into the Dark because I wanted more info about this 'cycling' thing. Because, as I said, editing is necessary and needs to get done one way or the other. And the way wasn't working for me, so off it was to find the other.
It didn't go into as much detail about the method as I wanted but then, that's not what the book is about. However, it was enough for me to decide to give it ago. Now, that experimental project is still in progress and anyway I'll need to repeat it multiple times for actual data, but so far... the editing part doesn't suck. I'm doing the exact same kind of editing as I'd do afterwards on a finished first draft, and yet the experience is completely different.
It's actually not painful! It's doable!
Halle-fucking-lujah. (No, really, this is a hallelujah moment.)
NaNoWriMo and its many, many participants outright tell you to ignore the quality of your work and instead do stupidly massive edits afterwards. It's not only expected that you'll need to rewrite your project, it's the norm. It's the sacrifice the challenge requires because otherwise 50k words in a month gets a lot harder, and if it's harder it's not as fun.
In writing community's online (by which I mean social medias and discord servers), at least from what I'd seen, "finish the draft first and worry about editing later" is the most common writing advice. And it sounds very professional, very logical, and I too raised a doubtful eyebrow whenever I saw somebody say that they do actually edit as they go.
There's a gut-reaction that editing as you write can't work. An instinctive response to shudder in horror. There's automatic *doubt*.
And if you edit as you write your NaNoWriMo project, there's outright disdain about your intelligence and your commitment to not only NaNoWriMo, but your project as well. There's an automatic assumption that you're ignorant not only of your own skill, but how writing works in general, and no hesitation in telling you so.
This has all been a very long-winded way to say that I'm having doubts about whether I want to do NaNoWriMo this month. My NaNo plan is kind of limbo right now and I'm left scratching my head.
I'm leaving you with the links that drove me down this rabbit hole. (And I do think it's funny my actual reasons for doubting NaNo aren't included in those articles.)
- Link 1: https://www.dystopic.co.uk/why-nanowrimo-is-bad-for-writers/
- Link 2: https://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2012/10/nanowrimo-good-bad-and-really-really_1.html
- Link 3: https://www.salon.com/2010/11/02/nanowrimo/
