National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an annual event where writers attempt to draft a 50,000-word manuscript in the month of November.
The event has helped tens of thousands of writers with their writing.
That said, NaNoWriMo is not without its problems.
In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, host Kevin T. Johns outlines what you need to know before committing to participating in NaNoWriMo.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript now!
The Writing Coach Episode #177 Show Notes
Download the FREE Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist Now!
The Writing Coach Episode #177 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. John’s here.
Now far too often as writers, when we’re trying to determine whether a scene is good or not, we’re really going on gut feel we’re writing this scene, and we’re going with what we intuitively feel like is the best that it can be.
Now while that might be good enough for a writer, in my role as an editor and as a writing coach, I really needed a more structured way to be able to analyze and improve the scenes of the clients that I work with.
What I ultimately ended up developing is a tool called The Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist. It is a checklist of over 20 questions I have in my head every single time I’m reviewing a scene and looking for ways to improve it.
I’ve made that tool available to you so that you can pick up your copy and start turning average scenes into literary gold.
Today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about the problems I see with National Novel Writing Month. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with NaNoWriMo yet—that’s the acronym that it’s affectionately known as —it’s an annual event every November where writers from all around the world commit to attempting to write 50,000 words of a novel in just one month. Obviously, this is a massive undertaking. The event has been really successful in inspiring hundreds, if not thousands of writers out there to get their work done.
That said, in today’s episode, we’re going to be looking at some of the potential problems that I see associated with this super famous and well-known writing challenge.
Before we go any further, let me be clear: I’m not here to bash NaNoWriMo. I think there are a ton of benefits to it. I just want to balance out those benefits with some of the drawbacks that I see. but first off, let’s talk about these benefits.
It Gets People Writing!
You know, why am I not bashing it? Well, I’m not going to bash anything that gets people writing. As a writing coach, a lover of literature, and an instructor of writing, I just want people to write. I want people to enjoy the experience. I want people to put words out into the world. I want people getting better at the craft of storytelling, and NaNoWriMo can be really helpful for people overcoming that fear of getting started or that procrastination, of actually finding the time or committing to really trying to write a book.
It Gives Writers a Timeline and a Deadline
NaNoWriMo also gives people at least the beginnings of a critical path, and, even more importantly, a deadline. You can break it down into something like 1800 words a day, but the goal is 50,000 words by the end of November. A lot of writers, especially beginner writers, just sit down and start writing a book without any sort of timeline and, worse yet, without any sort of deadline. This is why time and time again, we see first novels taking years and years to write. Well, of course, it takes years to write when you don’t have any sort of deadline! So National Novel Writing Month can be a great way of creating a deadline and a timeline for writers who otherwise might not have one.
It Gives Writers Lots of Opportunities for Support
National Novel Writing Month is also a great opportunity for people to get support with their writing. It’s a big national event, so all over the internet, there are tools, there are clubs, there are events, online and in person. It’s a great way for writers to find resources and find support to help them with their writing.
Community
It’s also a wonderful way to meet other writers.
Writing is such a solitary activity and NaNoWriMo is one of those events that can bring people together and allow writers from around the world online or in your local area to meet one another. I think that’s one of the coolest things about NaNo: there are in-person events that take place in cities all over the world where writers get together and do writing sprints together and have some fun together and more importantly, meet each other and socialize and start to develop a community of artists.
Those are just some of the benefits that I see to NaNoWriMo. That said, NaNo is not without its drawbacks, and I really want writers who are thinking about participating in it, I want you to have a balanced perspective before you commit to something like trying to write 50,000 words in a week and a half’s time. I’m sending this out the weekend of the third week of October, so that’s why obviously NaNO is on my mind. People are gearing up, people are getting ready to get started in a little over a week. So please, if you are thinking about participating, listen to this podcast first and get a balanced perspective.
We’ve covered some of the benefits. Now let’s talk about some of the drawbacks.
The Hockey Metaphor
I often use hockey metaphors in my writing coaching. I’m from Canada, and I played hockey all my life. I was a goaltender. I love watching hockey with my kids.
I think sport and art actually much more overlap than you might think.
I want you, instead of thinking of National Novel Writing Month, to think of National Hockey Playing Month. Imagine you’ve never played hockey, but you’ve been a fan all your life, and you’ve watched a million games, and you have a pretty good feeling that you’d be good at it. What would happen if you committed to playing hockey an hour a day for the next month?
Well, the expectation that some people might have is that “Oh, within a month’s time, I’m going to be an incredible hockey player. In fact, I might even be in the NHL if I dedicate a month to playing hockey.”
Of course, the reality is that you would realize skating is extremely hard, you would realize hockey is a complicated sport, and you would also perhaps realize that the people in the NHL are the absolute top elite of the elite athletes in that field. You’d also learn that most of them had been playing hockey nearly daily since they were probably about six years old, They have dedicated years and years and years to the sport, and not just playing the sport and practicing the sport, but also being overall athletes: to hitting the gym and to doing conditioning and stretching and probably watching their nutrition and having a good diet and doing everything they can to be professional athletes now.
Let’s say even a rookie in the NHL who gets in at 19 years old, they’ve spent probably 13 years focused on developing hockey and their body and their mindset and their diet and all of that. If you were to spend a month playing hockey, one hour a day, how far behind that professional hockey player would you be? Probably like a decade and two years and 11 months!
There is a huge difference between dedicating yourself to something for a month and dedicating yourself to something for a decade or more.
And, of course, that a little over a decade idea ties really nicely into Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule.” I think it was The Tipping Point where he stated his theory that if you spend 10,000 hours actively practicing something, you can be in the elite top 1% in the world or 5% or something of the people doing that thing.
What is 10,000 hours of practice? That’s an hour a day for a little over a decade, very similar to what professional hockey players put into becoming professional hockey players.
Expectations
There’s this expectation with National Novel Writing Month that people are going to sit down and write a book for a month and have something that’s comparable to Chuck Palahnuik, JK Rowling, Scott Smith, Stephen King… any of these amazing professional writers out there who’ve spent a lifetime practicing their craft.
When you set up the expectation that people are going to have this insane massive progress in a short period of time, what it really does is set people up for failure.
In fact, the reality is that in any given year, it’s somewhere between 10 to 20% of NaNoWriMo participants who actually reach the 50,000-word mark. So this is an event where 80 to 90% of the participants fail every single year. If you’ve set up this expectation for people that they’re going to be a superstar author at the end of the month, or at least have a publishable book, and the reality is that 80 to 90% of people don’t even finish the challenge, let alone have something good at the end of that… I don’t know… there’s something wrong there.
If you’re running an event with a 90% failure rate, maybe it’s time to rethink the way this challenge or this event is set up.
Reality
For most people, for 80 to 90% of people, what happens in National Novel Writing Month is that they discover Writing a book is really, really difficult. They also discover that something that appears as simple as writing 1800 words a day, every day for 30 days, is virtually impossible, especially when Thanksgiving falls in the middle of the month of November. Even the people who are killing it early in the month, suddenly American Thanksgiving hits, and there’s family, there’s turkey, there’s events, there’s things going on, and suddenly they fall off of the daily writing habit and things go down south quickly from there.
NaNoWriMo certainly helps people get writing, and some writers have fun and make massive progress on their creativity via the challenge. I think for a lot more people, however, the experience becomes a cold bucket of water dumped on them that leaves them feeling really disappointed and disheartened by how little they accomplished and how difficult they’ve discovered writing really is.
Speed Over Quality
Something NaNoWriMo also does is focus on speed over quality and that doesn’t normally bother me. I’m a huge fan of writing messy first drafts, the famous Anne Lamott “shitty first draft.”
But NaNoWriMo isn’t just writing fast. It’s writing hyperspeed, especially for beginners.
In my FIRST DRAFT program, where I’m working with a lot of first-time novelists who also have day jobs or families or kids or responsibilities, I encourage them to think about getting that book written in a six-month timeline, which I think is still very fast. I think you can still make crazy progress without being hyper-focused on revisions and everything, just getting things down in a six-month timeline. NaNoWriMo is six times faster than that, or I don’t know math, I’m terrible at math, but it’s they are suggesting doing what I think you should be doing in about six months, and they’re it down into one month. And for those who are able to accomplish that, it’s wonderful. You’ve got 50,000 words written in a month. But those 50,000 words are almost certainly a mess. There is a giant mess.
Many people write a book during National Novel Writing Month, and they never do anything with it because they’re so disheartened by the process. They don’t like the book they wrote, and they realize there’s so much work left still to do to get it into decent shape. They’ve put so much energy into just hitting that 50,000-word mark in such a short period of time, that they’re completely out of energy and enthusiasm required for revisions.
Yes, write a first messy first draft.
I’m all about that.
But don’t do it at such a hyper pace that when you’re done, you have no energy or interest to continue working on the book.
Stress
I mean, this whole idea of writing 50,000 words in a month’s time, especially for a beginner or first-time novelist, is like this idea of just throwing the person into the deep end and seeing if they sink or swim. swim. Maybe some people learn by swimming that way, but I think a lot more people probably almost drowned in the process. I don’t want people to almost drown trying to create art.
National Novel Writing Month is extremely stressful. If you’re going to actually hit that 50,000-word mark, you’ve really got to structure your entire life around that goal for a month’s time. And I mean, that kind of pressure, it can really lead to burnout, and blocks and frustration, and all of these things that a writer encounters under a reasonably paced timeline. Now you’re piling all that stress onto yourself in order to try to meet this challenge.
Personally, I don’t think people create or get into a flow state at their best when they’re stressed. I certainly don’t. I know, there are some people, even going back to university, some people feel like they do their best work when they cram it all in the night before. I’ve never been like that. When I feel stressed, I feel tight and blocked. And I feel unable to think. So I never left work to the last moment because I wanted to approach my writing and my research in a way that didn’t leave me feeling stressed and burned out and exhausted.
Not Everything Has to Be a Competition
Now, something you’ll see in the world of National Novel Writing Month is that they also often use the term “winning” to mean that you completed your 50,000 words in a month’s time, and there’s lots of reference to “winning” NaNoWriMo. I think you sometimes get little badges and things for winning NaNoWriMo.
I understand what they’re doing here. They’re using gamification, They’re taking something that might feel like hard work, and they’re trying to turn it into a game and make it fun. And I get that, and to a certain extent, I appreciate it.
But at the same time, the word “winning” really rubs me the wrong way.
The Oscars or the Auroras, these award ceremonies for works of art, have always rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. “It’s the best film of the year.” The best film according to what? According to whom? One work of art might be trying to accomplish one thing, and another work of art might be trying to accomplish another, and the idea that we then have some sort of homogenized competition where we pit them against each other, it just doesn’t really work.
This idea of art as a contest bothers me.
My daughter is a competitive dancer and she views dancing as a sport. She goes to these competitions where people compete and get ribbons and trophies and awards. For me, when I think about dance, I think of it like writing: art, creativity and a form of self-expression. would so much rather she go to these dance events with this performance mindset of saying, “I’m going to express myself through dance,” as opposed to saying, “Oh, my team is going to compete.” I understand she is approaching it like a sport, but not everything needs to be a sport.
Not everything in life needs to be a competition, and I don’t like turning writing into a sport. I don’t think you win or lose at art. I think the only time you’re winning at art is when you’re doing it. And when you’re losing at art, it is when you’re not doing it. If you are actively working on your writing, if you are working on a work in progress, that’s winning to me. Every single day you get up and get in front of that computer and put your fingers on the keyboard, instead of picking up the video game controller or instead of doing the laundry or instead of doing whatever it is that you do instead of your creative work that’s losing, that’s winning.
The Comparison Game
I really think this idea of competition, in general, can be really negative for writers.
One of the great benefits of National Novel Writing Month is that it’s this community event that people are doing together. But the fact that they’re doing it together in such a specific way, can actually be harmful because there’s constant comparison. You’re looking at what other people’s word counts are at and if everyone is way ahead of you or if you’ve fallen behind, there’s this sense of inadequacy or this sense of failure that can really take the joy away from writing.
Now, I absolutely believe in the power of community and in the power of doing your writing as part of a collective as part of a group. That’s why I have group coaching programs like FIRST DRAFT.
But in FIRST DRAFT, right off the bat, we’re very clear: everyone is on their own path. They’re working in their own timelines. Different people have different amounts of time and energy available to dedicate to their writing. So in FIRST DRAFT, what we do in the first week we set up individual goals, individual timelines, and individual writing schedules because we’re all different.
While the people in that program are there in the trenches together working on books, no one’s comparing themselves to anyone else in terms of progress or timelines.
As an artist—I mean, as a person—the only person you should be comparing yourself to is who you were yesterday, who you were a month ago, and who you were a year ago Are you personally getting better at the things that you want to get better at? Are you progressing towards your goals? Is that book that you want to get written moving towards completion at the rate that you committed to for yourself?
So this idea of NaNo being a competition where you’re up against everyone else participating in it, I’m not a big fan of that. I think we all have such different lives and different approaches that you really need to create individual timelines for your creativity.
All right, so National Novel Writing Month has a ton of benefits, and I know people love it, and people go in having fun, but I hope this podcast episode has helped you also go into it with some perspective and with some understanding of the drawbacks that come along with participating in something like NaNoWriMo.
Now if you’re done with that first draft and you’re into the revisions phase, and if you’re looking for ways to make your writing better, make sure to pick up the Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklists. You can use that to take your average or okay scenes and turn them into extraordinary scenes.
All right, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
