I'm saying this elsewhere; I probably should say it here.
So apparently someone over at Salon.com has been ragging on NaNoWriMo. It's becoming a bit of internet kerfuffle, with people defending the notion, and calling the writer of the Salon.com piece everything from elitist to killjoy.
I wonder if I'm reading a different article.
To be blunt, I'm of the "throw more impediments in their way" school of writer discouragement. Now, before you come after me with pickaxes, allow me to explain.
First, anyone under the age of 21 who wants to write? Encourage them. There may be a few poseurs among that group, but it's the magic age where people do optional things almost exclusively because they want to. They may decide later they don't enjoy it, but youth should never be discouraged from trying things.
Adults who genuinely want to write, who have a love of words--presumably gained by reading--so deep that they want to tell their own stories? These people should be encouraged. The world will throw a lot of scorn in their path, and decent human beings will help them get around and over that crap and help them do the thing they really want to do.
But there are a lot of people who want to write for reasons that I can only interpret as massive egotism. If a writer is convinced that they are the next Hemingway, or that "the world really needs my story," or they are producing something staggeringly important that will change the life of everyone who reads it, she should be locked somewhere far away from a computer. Let him scrawl his treatises with crayon like other madmen. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to shove their work under the noses of innocent readers.
Now, NaNo does not cause this phenomenon, and so I have no objection to NaNo in principle. For the past two years, I have taken NaNo as impetus to remind me to put AIC and produce words. I set a much more modest target than 50K because I know my own work pattern, but the spirit of the thing is useful. (Also, I set my NaNo time from late October to the day before Thanksgiving, because what idiot thought it should happen during a month when most Americans lose several days of production to our biggest national holiday?)
But I can understand a frustration with NaNo in particular. There only one sort of person more annoying to me than the one who says, "I have a great idea for a book..." and then proceeds to talk about how they would love to write this book if they just had the time.
Well, NaNo gives them the time and now they become the even-more-annoying person: the one who says, "I wrote a book and I'm trying to find a publisher..." but then goes on to talk in terms that reveal they don't know jack shit about the industry. They got critiques from their non-writer friends, they did minimal revision, they're not working on anything else. They don't understand how to prepare and submit a manuscript. They think paying an agent up-front fees is okay.
The first hundred times I ran into this person, I tried to explain reality to them. About 30% refused to believe Yog's Law. Another 15% thought rewriting would just "corrupt" their sacred initial impulses. Half acknowledged that most writers rewrite, but they thought their proofreading for spelling and grammar errors qualified as rewriting. Almost all were overjoyed to hear I work for a publisher and would I mind bringing it to an editor instead of making them go through slush?
So, yeah, I'm not all rah-rah, make-with-the-joy-of-creation-ye-artists about my fellow writers.
Writers who know what's what and use NaNo as impetus to focus on doing what they want to anyway, to you I say, "GO GO GO!" Make more books that I might want to read.
Writers who are maybe ignorant now but are willing to learn, and NaNo gives them their first taste of the hard business of writing, to you I also offer encouragement.
Writers who fall into categories 1-10 under part 3 of Slushkiller: if you aren't trying to make your work better, then you need to just put the keyboard down and back away. You're just interfering in the process for everyone in the industry who wants to publish good books.
If, on the other hand, you are genuinely interested in learning how to write, then NaNo to your heart's content. But be aware that this business of learning how to write never ends. Even when you are consistently turning out publishable material, you will always have something else to learn, some other way to be a better writer.
Getting words down is difficult; for some it is the hardest part. But shaping words into something readable is a necessary next step.