There’s an annual, month-long phenomenon called National Novel Writing Month (usually referenced by the offensively cutesy portmanteau, NaNoWriMo), and any writer with a blog worth its Google-salt is mentioning it — often through several posts. The idea is that participants spend the entire month of November writing, and completing, an entire 50k word novel, with the ultimate goal of completing the story. Please disregard awkwardly-worded clauses or continuity errors: crossing the finish line is the point.
I think it’s a rather noble idea to encourage people to embrace the extended written word, in a world of Twitter, “Top 10 Most” whatever articles, and (ahem) blog posts. But there’s something that makes me uneasy about it — not about doing it, but the concept itself. Naturally, one month completing a first draft does not a novel make; we call a child’s first misshapen agglomeration of dough and frosting a “cake”, but only in the most diplomatic sense of the word. Novels of any size aren’t pulled from the ground and immediately flash-fried, they are gathered from places far and wide and slow cooked over a period of months and years. They also require professional editors, especially in the realm of fiction, to rake the author’s puffed-up fantasies over the coals and get them to do more, better, simpler, less bloated.
There are writers that whittle their entire lives away to carve the most perfect (in their eyes, at least) story. To call a (relatively) hastily-cobbled group of words a “novel” when the ideal is more than likely so far removed from it cheapens the value of the word. It seems that the NaNoWriMo people know this in the back of their minds, because the website is littered with some kinds of disclaimers approaching this sentiment. It just seems to smack of dabbling-ism, which is a different post altogether.
If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, you should now stop reading this and getting back to naming your protagonist’s cat Socrates or Diderot or having your informant pile a file folder out of his trenchcoat.