Happy NaNoWriMo! Here's why all of your strong opinions about NaNoWriMo are point-missing bullcrap. :)
Writing a good book might be a function of "grind" for you. It also might not be. The One Weird Trick you need to find out what works for you? Self-knowledge and self-parenting. (Oh wait, that's 2.)
There’s only one Twitter I hate more than awards show Twitter, and it is #NaNoWriMo Twitter. But that’s not NaNoWriMo’s fault.
In case you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is: it’s short for National Novel Writing Month, a twenty-two-year-old (!) phenomenon that takes place online every November. It’s a collective challenge involving hundreds of thousands of authors all cheering each other on to complete a 50,000-word novel draft in 30 days.
Founded by writer Chris Baty in 1999, NaNoWriMo has now been an official nonprofit for a decade and a half, offering community and support for participating writers and teaming up with sponsors to offer prizes and discounts. The organization also—among other worthy things—works with schools and libraries to encourage young people’s participation in the challenge.
Although NaNoWriMo hosts its own forums for participating writers, a lot of enthusiasm bubbles over to Twitter. This year’s participants have already begun to track their progress on the #NaNoWriMo21 hashtag.
Now we are coming to what, exactly, I can’t stand: the Annual NaNoWriMo Twitter Discourse.
I grabbed these tweets at random off a keyword search, but my personal Twitter feed this morning is just tweet after tweet like this: people hyping NaNoWriMo because they hope the public commitment will keep them on track producing a manuscript. People shitting on NaNoWriMo because they think it’s ridiculous that anyone would ever think they could write a decent manuscript in a month. And above all else, people just saying that word. Over and over. Out loud. NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo.
During the month of November, I feel like every author on Earth (or at least on Twitter) feels compelled to make some kind of official statement about their relationship with NanNoWriMo, however boring. And for reasons probably best relegated to psychotherapy, this drives me INSANE. I’m a compulsive people-fixer! I want to scream at all of you, you’re missing the point here!1
As a literary agent who sells novels to publishers, a lover of both literary and commercial fiction, and a champion personal-life procrastinator who has been kicking a can of various novel ideas down the road for literally 23 years, I am both one of you and not.
I know what makes authors do their best work. I know how to sell that best work to commercial publishers. And when authors are struggling, I know where they can find emotional Ex-Lax for constipations of perfectionism and imposter syndrome.
It drives me bananas that so many authors seem not to know what or where the Ex-Lax is—that or they’re just unwilling to take it. But then again, it’s not like I’m Miss Regular and Responsible myself. So.
You do at least know where the Ex-Lax is, right???
It’s on the shelf of emotional health and self-knowledge. Getting over yourself isn’t a function of grind OR procrastination, structure OR structurelessness. It’s a function of having self-esteem.
As long as you feel compelled to seek external validation for your creative methodology, something will be suboptimal about your creative methodology.
An emotionally healthy and self-actualized writer does not feel compelled to do any of the following things:
1. convince other writers their methodology is wrong;
2. convince other people their methodology is right; or
3. remind other people that no one methodology is “right.”
An emotionally healthy author will either shrug at their Twitter feed about all this or just find it boring. Or maybe they’ll feel the impulse to comment, but they’ll recognize that this impulse is not at all about NaNoWriMo. It is about their personal, unrelated, unmet childhood need to hear an adult they care about reassure them, “you are doing it right and are wonderful just the way you are.”
Once triggered to seek validation this way, emotionally healthy authors remind themselves that because they are adults and not children, only they are capable of reassuring themselves in a way that will stick. Whether or not they have confidence in their own choices is entirely up to them.
If randos on the internet do it differently, who the fuck cares? Not emotionally healthy authors! They’re not even saying to themselves “who the fuck cares,” because that implies that they’re still trying to convince themselves not to.
Stop data-seeking about something subjective like how long it takes to write a quality novel. Only an actual birdbrain would argue that there is an objective answer.
Kazuo Ishiguro wrote Remains of the Day in about four weeks, plus a little bit of revision time, after doing the research for a little bit beforehand. In the previous year, he had managed to write all of one chapter of another novel.
Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks after obsessively ruminating about it for three years.
Shirley Hazzard took twenty-plus years to write The Great Fire—or at least she took that many years to hibernate before having out with it.
Erin Morgenstern complains annually that The Night Circus gets celebrated as a NaNoWriMo achievement, when in fact she ended up rewriting every word of it and revising it for years after the initial draft.
I could give you more data points here, but data points are a distraction. What you really need to know is this: IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR EXTERNAL DATA POINTS TO VALIDATE WHAT SEEMS RIGHT FOR YOU, YOUR EMOTIONAL HEALTH AIN’T QUITE THERE YET, AND YOUR NOVEL WILL NOT BE, EITHER.
There is nothing objective about creativity. We do not live in Malcolm Gladwell’s Metric Universe, which would be eerily like the planet Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time if it existed. Creativity is WITHIN YOU and UP TO YOU.
As an author, you need to inhabit authority. That authority needs to start with the authority you have over yourself.
Be your own most loving and faithful authority. Laugh yourself out of your own brittle ego stories, whether they consist of things you can’t do (“I’m a loser”) or things you absolutely can (“I’m the greatest, I can move mountains, and you all are MORONS!!”). Laugh yourself out of the belief that there are Rules Here and that the only reason you’re struggling with a goal is that you haven’t yet learned the Rules Here that the people who don’t seem to be struggling already know.
Laugh yourself away from your need to posture and perform. Honor yourself as the wonderful person you are and the equally wonderful yet different person you will become every moment until you die. (And beyond! THANKS, DECOMPOSITION.)
Honor whatever it is you need, however weird or unusual, to accomplish the things you yearn for.
Stop looking for people like me to tell you you’re worth something. We’re all human here, though, so I’m going to do it anyway. You are worth something. And your timing—whatever it is—is going to be perfect for you.
I am also missing the point and a hypocrite, because here I am doing the very thing I’m criticizing. WHATEVER, DENISE.