The Nation Novel Writing Month

You don’t dedicate your life to something without becoming a bit of a snob about it. Regardless of my actual skill as a writer, I’ve generated enough written pages to equal my own body weight, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve committed enough time and effort to the practice to get the privilege of a little snobbery. So I’m not too afraid to come write out and say that I don’t get the Nation Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’m not exactly opposed to it, at least not as much as my brother (who actually finished the challenge and wrote an entire novel just to make fun of it, which seems like stretching meta-irony so far that it’s not really irony anymore), but I can’t help but feel a little alienated when my Facebook feed fills up with NaNoWriMo-related content.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a monthly challenge that has gotten pretty popular over the past couple of years, netting 400,000 participants last year. The idea is that aspiring writers all come together for the month of November and each try to write a full novel (defined as 50,000 words). 

Given how much I claim to love writing and the writing community, it seems like NaNoWriMo would be the kind of thing I’d love. That’s what I thought when I first found out about it in high school. It felt great when I started writing a novel of my own, at least at first. The heavy demands of the daily word count forced me to take an idea I’d been considering for a while and put it to paper. Something about the structure of the project made my writing feel more substantial, like instead of just generating words by myself I was channeling the energy of the thousands of people working beside me. The setting felt more real than anything I’d ever written before, the characters seemed to have authentic voices for the first time, the plot felt less like something I was making up as I went along and more like something that had happened a long time ago, something I’d forgotten for almost all my life and was only just now remembering.

And then it all blew up. Suddenly I was spending three pages describing someone’s left shoe because I didn’t know how to move the story forward but still had to meet the day’s writing quota. A couple days like this in a row and I found myself with 40,000 words of a story that was only moving further from a real conclusion as it got closer to the end. And yeah, of course it would turn out like that, it was only the second novel I’d ever written. Even so, the failure felt like something more important than just a writing project that didn’t take off. It was a novel that was part of an institution, so my failure wasn’t my own to bear, but something to judge against people who had succeeded. 

So, like so many other disaffected youngsters, I got bitter and turned against the system. I found out that, of the thousands of novels written over NaNoWriMo, only six have been published and gone on to any kind of acclaim. I read one of the few popular products of NaNoWriMo for school, The Night Circus, and felt vindicated that this stupid challenge was full of wannabe writers who churned out 50,000 words of fluff without ever saying something of value. Real writers, meanwhile, were the folks who suffered for their work, the sort who didn’t need pretty little online wordcount calculators to know that they were making literature, the kind who weren’t afraid to go outside and live! Not that that’s anything close to what I was then, or am now, but I was a storyteller, it was only natural that I would make up a story about myself.

The story I made about myself was ultimately just a way to cover up my overwhelming fear. My first NaNoWriMo was when I realized how big the writing world was, and how little I mattered in all of it. There’s a quote in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar that sums it all up perfectly: “Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing. Say someone or other finished a manuscript in every minute; in five minutes that would be five manuscripts stacked on the Fiction Editor’s desk. With the hour there would be sixty, crowding each other out on the floor. And in a year…”

If I had to read all the manuscripts that showed up at her desk in a year, or that people made for NaNoWriMo in a month, then I’d probably be so braindead from all the words that I wouldn’t even recognize my own when I finally found it. So what are the odds that it will stand out to anyone else?

There are legitimate reasons why I don’t do NaNoWriMo. I strive to write 2,000 words a day whenever I’m not editing (and even then that’s the goal, it’s just harder to quantify), so marking November as special really doesn’t work for me. And I know from experience that having a word limit for first drafts is a terrible idea, they inevitably feel stretched too thin or cut off too soon. But, at the heart of it, it’s all about how the sheer size of the NaNoWriMo community makes the world of writers seem so large, and makes me feel so small in comparison.

But there is some hope, I think. A few months after my NaNoWriMo failure, I found out that they had something called Camp NaNoWriMo, where some algorithm sorts writers into twelve person private message boards called cabins for them to chat as they work on their stories. In this more laid-back section, you can set your wordcount however you wanted, and I selected a more reasonable 30,000. I didn’t end up hitting that either, but through the chatroom I found someone who asked if anyone wanted to exchange writing after the month was over. I took her up on her offer. She sent me some of her writing and I sent her some of mine and we gave each other encouragement and gentle feedback. The writing world seemed smaller all of a sudden, and much friendlier, and some of my disaffected youthful bitterness started to fade.