NaNo Analysis: The Good And The Bad
I'm not doing NaNo, but I am taking November (and a bit of December) as an opportunity to write up some observations from doing it last year. Any verb-tense weirdness is due to this sitting half-written on my laptop since they were current; I did mention I write slow. This is the third and probably final installment.
NaNoWriMo is a bit of a Thing in the writing world. You do it, or you don't do it, and you proselytize the doing/not doing... or maybe you are one of the quiet voices who says that it's fine if that sort of thing works for you, but it doesn't work for everybody and could we all just stop trying to declare the One True Way for everybody to write.
NaNo last year worked for me in the sense that I got my 50,000 words (and finished the book shortly thereafter). It did not work for me in several other ways, and that's what this post is about. Fair warning: if you are sailing happily along in the "NaNo is awesome!" glow, you might not want to read on.
There are a couple of difficulties with the actual writing as done during NaNo, and I don't mean that it was done fast so it must be bad; speed of writing has no objective standard relation to quality of result, and if you think it does, go read this Pat Wrede post. No, but there are things that writing that fast does to my process that in turn make other parts of my process more difficult.
I've already discussed the issue of [too many brackets] in a previous post; taking the time to saunter through the thesaurus occasionally definitely makes things easier for me, and may well make them faster in the long run, too. It also keeps my vocabulary active; I swear I could feel my word-recall getting flabby by the end of last November, and I think if I wrote that way all the time I'd soon be in danger of being unable to call up words like "cat" and "dog", never mind "adumbrate" and "sesquipedalian".
The other actual writing-related problem is that when I write that fast, I don't remember what I've written. The housemate tells me it was actually rather freaky the way I could cite chapter-and-verse for any given bit of Highway of Mirrors while I was working on it, usually with an exact quote. Less so after the last round of revisions, because things moved, but up until then I could pinpoint my way through the whole novel. And this is pretty standard for me and my writing.
For Kitchen Sink, however, I've mentally mislaid entire scenes and plot complications. This is eminently fixable with a combination of re-reading and note-taking, but it feels really wrong to me that it's necessary at all. Having to consciously push myself back into not just the mood but the data-set for the story is remarkably daunting.
Another thing that I've noticed about NaNo, come revisions time, is that it makes me even more reluctant to cut existing text than I already was. But that'll cost me three words! Yes, yes it will. That does not automatically mean it's a bad choice. ;-)
There are some good things about NaNo. The focus, of course; there's something about signing up in the big public forum that rivets one's attention to the work in a way that a simple private declaration of intent just doesn't do.
The discussion forums were handy a couple of times for researching. While the general level of factual data on NaNo's forums is, um, not exactly peer-reviewed academic standard, the sheer volume of people means that there's at least a couple folks to answer almost any question. And both the volume and intensity of participation mean a much lower likelihood of crickets chirping than on, say, LiveJournal.
The publicly-available statistics tracking worked very well for me. I wish there was some version of this, complete with the public-accountability aspect, without all the... NaNo-ism. (More on that below.) I really liked having my little progress-bar chart handy at a moment's clicking.
What did not work so well were the pep-talks. The NaNoWriMo organizers provide a variety of messages throughout the month, meant to be supportive and encouraging. Unfortunately, they're all along the line of "it doesn't matter if what you write sucks, only that you write it." Now, I understand that for many people, that makes it easier for them to write by taking the pressure off, but for me, saying that it doesn't matter if it's good is tantamount to saying it doesn't matter if you do it at all. This sort of "pep talk" is actively discouraging to me. And unfortunately, that's the only kind they offer; there's no option to sign up for the ass-kicking drill-sergeant version of the pep talks, because there isn't one.
The forums are no better. (There is the annual Curmudgeon's thread, thank ghu, where among other things writing shit is not celebrated, but it's a tiny voice in the wilderness.)
And as if "It's okay to write crap!" wasn't bad enough, NaNo barely gets a week in before the chants of "It's okay if you don't make 50,000" start up. The ostensible point of NaNo is to write 50,000 words in a month, yet there's more focus on assuring people that it's just as good if they don't than on encouraging them to do. Failure is not just an option with NaNoWriMo, it's practically celebrated. And again, a constant chorus insisting that you "win" whether you do 50,000 words or 500 is actively discouraging to me. I'll just go on record right here: If your goal is to write 50,000 words and you don't do it -- and especially if you flake out in the early weeks because, oh gosh, it might actually take some effort -- then you did fail. You did lose. It doesn't make you a universal failure as a human being, no, but it does mean that you failed at that goal -- and no, that's not just as good as succeeding.
I'm reminded of when my nephew was young, and his school did an athletic competition. Nephew was pretty fit, so he came home with a blue ribbon. And threw it away, because "everybody got a ribbon." It didn't matter. If losing's just as good as winning, why bother to win?
I may do NaNo again, and if I do, I may even hang out on the forums again. But if I do, I'm starting a thread called "not okay to fail, not okay to suck". It'll probably work as well as the Slow Writers Anonymous thread I started last year (fgs, writing speed =/= typing speed, people!), but somebody's gotta say it.
Now, the other thing about NaNo is the community aspect, and there, I'm afraid, things fall down rather.
One of my fringe-benefit reasons for doing NaNo was to meet other writers. There's an active online forum, and there's also regional in-person groups, so this seemed a reasonable aspiration. And I did meet some very nice people at the regional kick-off meeting.
The thing about NaNo is, it's incredibly prescriptive about process and mindset. Thou SHALT spew word-vomit upon the page, as fast as thy fingers can type; any mention of quality or even awareness of whether you've written something decent is verbotten. Now, I get that that approach works well for some people, and that's great; however, it is not the only way to write, and it definitely is not mine.
And there is no acknowledgment that different people have different processes, and that what works well for some might be actively detrimental to others. The one write-in I attended, I had to get quite defensive about the fact that I was on course to make my 50,000, I was happy with both my progress and my quality, and no I didn't "need" to do it their way, thank you very much. When I explained, complete with self-inflicted demonstration, that word-war-style speed-writing was for me like having someone standing behind me and poking me in the back of the head every two seconds, they finally backed off, but I was definitely odd man out for the whole event.
In short, every "supportive" activity of NaNoWriMo made me feel less motivated, less included, and generally less like what I was doing mattered. (I suppose you could say that my backlash against all this was to be all the more determined both to finish and finish well, and in that sense I guess you could say their "support" worked, but I'm thinking there has to be a better way.) This is obviously some strange new definition of the word "supportive" that I hadn't previously encountered, and it's one I can do without, especially when I'm trying to tackle a project of already-daunting enormity.
I am damn proud of the book I got out of NaNo. Not just that it's done; it's also good, IMNSHO. I'm glad that I did NaNo last year, both for ...And The Kitchen Sink's existence and for the NaNo experiment itself. I may even do it again some year, if the right project comes along. But you won't catch me proselytizing NaNoWriMo, and I think NaNoWriMo could benefit from a lot less proselytizing itself.
This entry was originally posted at http://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/101649.html because LiveJournal has broken posting on my browser. Comments accepted here, but please comment on Dreamwidth if you possibly can.
NaNoWriMo is a bit of a Thing in the writing world. You do it, or you don't do it, and you proselytize the doing/not doing... or maybe you are one of the quiet voices who says that it's fine if that sort of thing works for you, but it doesn't work for everybody and could we all just stop trying to declare the One True Way for everybody to write.
NaNo last year worked for me in the sense that I got my 50,000 words (and finished the book shortly thereafter). It did not work for me in several other ways, and that's what this post is about. Fair warning: if you are sailing happily along in the "NaNo is awesome!" glow, you might not want to read on.
There are a couple of difficulties with the actual writing as done during NaNo, and I don't mean that it was done fast so it must be bad; speed of writing has no objective standard relation to quality of result, and if you think it does, go read this Pat Wrede post. No, but there are things that writing that fast does to my process that in turn make other parts of my process more difficult.
I've already discussed the issue of [too many brackets] in a previous post; taking the time to saunter through the thesaurus occasionally definitely makes things easier for me, and may well make them faster in the long run, too. It also keeps my vocabulary active; I swear I could feel my word-recall getting flabby by the end of last November, and I think if I wrote that way all the time I'd soon be in danger of being unable to call up words like "cat" and "dog", never mind "adumbrate" and "sesquipedalian".
The other actual writing-related problem is that when I write that fast, I don't remember what I've written. The housemate tells me it was actually rather freaky the way I could cite chapter-and-verse for any given bit of Highway of Mirrors while I was working on it, usually with an exact quote. Less so after the last round of revisions, because things moved, but up until then I could pinpoint my way through the whole novel. And this is pretty standard for me and my writing.
For Kitchen Sink, however, I've mentally mislaid entire scenes and plot complications. This is eminently fixable with a combination of re-reading and note-taking, but it feels really wrong to me that it's necessary at all. Having to consciously push myself back into not just the mood but the data-set for the story is remarkably daunting.
Another thing that I've noticed about NaNo, come revisions time, is that it makes me even more reluctant to cut existing text than I already was. But that'll cost me three words! Yes, yes it will. That does not automatically mean it's a bad choice. ;-)
There are some good things about NaNo. The focus, of course; there's something about signing up in the big public forum that rivets one's attention to the work in a way that a simple private declaration of intent just doesn't do.
The discussion forums were handy a couple of times for researching. While the general level of factual data on NaNo's forums is, um, not exactly peer-reviewed academic standard, the sheer volume of people means that there's at least a couple folks to answer almost any question. And both the volume and intensity of participation mean a much lower likelihood of crickets chirping than on, say, LiveJournal.
The publicly-available statistics tracking worked very well for me. I wish there was some version of this, complete with the public-accountability aspect, without all the... NaNo-ism. (More on that below.) I really liked having my little progress-bar chart handy at a moment's clicking.
What did not work so well were the pep-talks. The NaNoWriMo organizers provide a variety of messages throughout the month, meant to be supportive and encouraging. Unfortunately, they're all along the line of "it doesn't matter if what you write sucks, only that you write it." Now, I understand that for many people, that makes it easier for them to write by taking the pressure off, but for me, saying that it doesn't matter if it's good is tantamount to saying it doesn't matter if you do it at all. This sort of "pep talk" is actively discouraging to me. And unfortunately, that's the only kind they offer; there's no option to sign up for the ass-kicking drill-sergeant version of the pep talks, because there isn't one.
The forums are no better. (There is the annual Curmudgeon's thread, thank ghu, where among other things writing shit is not celebrated, but it's a tiny voice in the wilderness.)
And as if "It's okay to write crap!" wasn't bad enough, NaNo barely gets a week in before the chants of "It's okay if you don't make 50,000" start up. The ostensible point of NaNo is to write 50,000 words in a month, yet there's more focus on assuring people that it's just as good if they don't than on encouraging them to do. Failure is not just an option with NaNoWriMo, it's practically celebrated. And again, a constant chorus insisting that you "win" whether you do 50,000 words or 500 is actively discouraging to me. I'll just go on record right here: If your goal is to write 50,000 words and you don't do it -- and especially if you flake out in the early weeks because, oh gosh, it might actually take some effort -- then you did fail. You did lose. It doesn't make you a universal failure as a human being, no, but it does mean that you failed at that goal -- and no, that's not just as good as succeeding.
I'm reminded of when my nephew was young, and his school did an athletic competition. Nephew was pretty fit, so he came home with a blue ribbon. And threw it away, because "everybody got a ribbon." It didn't matter. If losing's just as good as winning, why bother to win?
I may do NaNo again, and if I do, I may even hang out on the forums again. But if I do, I'm starting a thread called "not okay to fail, not okay to suck". It'll probably work as well as the Slow Writers Anonymous thread I started last year (fgs, writing speed =/= typing speed, people!), but somebody's gotta say it.
Now, the other thing about NaNo is the community aspect, and there, I'm afraid, things fall down rather.
One of my fringe-benefit reasons for doing NaNo was to meet other writers. There's an active online forum, and there's also regional in-person groups, so this seemed a reasonable aspiration. And I did meet some very nice people at the regional kick-off meeting.
The thing about NaNo is, it's incredibly prescriptive about process and mindset. Thou SHALT spew word-vomit upon the page, as fast as thy fingers can type; any mention of quality or even awareness of whether you've written something decent is verbotten. Now, I get that that approach works well for some people, and that's great; however, it is not the only way to write, and it definitely is not mine.
And there is no acknowledgment that different people have different processes, and that what works well for some might be actively detrimental to others. The one write-in I attended, I had to get quite defensive about the fact that I was on course to make my 50,000, I was happy with both my progress and my quality, and no I didn't "need" to do it their way, thank you very much. When I explained, complete with self-inflicted demonstration, that word-war-style speed-writing was for me like having someone standing behind me and poking me in the back of the head every two seconds, they finally backed off, but I was definitely odd man out for the whole event.
In short, every "supportive" activity of NaNoWriMo made me feel less motivated, less included, and generally less like what I was doing mattered. (I suppose you could say that my backlash against all this was to be all the more determined both to finish and finish well, and in that sense I guess you could say their "support" worked, but I'm thinking there has to be a better way.) This is obviously some strange new definition of the word "supportive" that I hadn't previously encountered, and it's one I can do without, especially when I'm trying to tackle a project of already-daunting enormity.
I am damn proud of the book I got out of NaNo. Not just that it's done; it's also good, IMNSHO. I'm glad that I did NaNo last year, both for ...And The Kitchen Sink's existence and for the NaNo experiment itself. I may even do it again some year, if the right project comes along. But you won't catch me proselytizing NaNoWriMo, and I think NaNoWriMo could benefit from a lot less proselytizing itself.
This entry was originally posted at http://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/101649.html because LiveJournal has broken posting on my browser. Comments accepted here, but please comment on Dreamwidth if you possibly can.