Does NaNoWriMo foster bad writing habits?

[sushimustwrite]

There's a discussion in the NaNoWriMo forums about a non-writer friend of a Wrimo who believes that NaNoWriMo fosters bad writing habits. Does it, though? The non-Wrimo friend believes that NaNo encourages writers to pad and worry about deadlines and word count instead of writing on one's own and page count. Let's take a look

Comments

[kaesa]

I guess I'm a little confused about the fear of developing "bad writing habits" like padding, because they're so irrelevant to the finished product. I don't know that I consider myself a NaNo writer -- I've written twice during NaNo but never finished -- but I do tend to write the best in an environment where a bunch of other people are writing and wordcounts matter. In addition to the motivation it gives me, the deadline often gets me to consider plotlines and possibilities that I would never have thought of, and gives me that extra incentive to say "oh, why not? Let's see where this rabbit hole leads. If it's awful I can return to the planned outline." And I almost never return to the planned outline.

Anyway, that all might occasionally lead to padding. The thing is, though, you get to edit. NaNo and similar projects are not for producing publishable work, they're for getting first drafts finished, and I'm finding (working not to a deadline or with a wordcount goal) that what I need to do, often, is to get the words on the page and then I can pick out which subplots and characters add nothing, where I've written things just because I like the sound of my own keyboard, etc. And then I can cut them out. And sometimes scenes that didn't seem relevant at the time I wrote them, but there they were, insisting I write them, end up being (upon reread) thematically important or necessary for characterization, or they lay groundwork for plot twists I hadn't actually thought of when I was writing them.

(Shorter me: "I love writing! I have no idea how it works but haters gonna hate, and writers gonna write. And edit.")