Comment Re:When did mediocrity become something to shoot f (Score 2, Insightful) 213
I just see a lot of beginners tackling novels before they have the skills to do it, and getting so wrapped up in their baby that it's devestating when they can't sell it.
That's the beauty of NaNoWriMo. It's so ridiculous, so high-spirited, so much pure fun, that no one expects their novels to be great literary works of art. They're not paralyzed by the fear that they'll write 50,000 words of crap, because they expect to write 50,000 words of crap. Instead of spending years struggling to write the Great American Novel and then being devastated when that first effort doesn't sell, they can write 50,000 words of something they enjoy for pure fun, and learn something in the process. And they don't have to invest years of struggle into it.
For a few people (myself included), that first hectic effort is a very rough draft that later gets ripped apart - I literally cut and reworked 40,000 words in my first edit alone - and polished several times for eventual submission to publishers. In those cases, we're still talking about a significant time investment and a serious project. For other people, it's just fun, a way to see if they can do it.
I haven't yet seen anyone on NaNo who considered their unedited NaNo effort to be a work of genius or who was disappointed about seeing it rejected. And at the rate of one NaNo a year, a writer would likely have at least two books completed before getting the first one rejected, so there's unlikely to be the same element of "I can't believe they rejected my baby" in the process.
You say that the idea of writing a novel before you were ready was psychologically daunting. The whole point of NaNo is to make the process less psychologically daunting. Isn't that a good thing?
That's the beauty of NaNoWriMo. It's so ridiculous, so high-spirited, so much pure fun, that no one expects their novels to be great literary works of art. They're not paralyzed by the fear that they'll write 50,000 words of crap, because they expect to write 50,000 words of crap. Instead of spending years struggling to write the Great American Novel and then being devastated when that first effort doesn't sell, they can write 50,000 words of something they enjoy for pure fun, and learn something in the process. And they don't have to invest years of struggle into it.
For a few people (myself included), that first hectic effort is a very rough draft that later gets ripped apart - I literally cut and reworked 40,000 words in my first edit alone - and polished several times for eventual submission to publishers. In those cases, we're still talking about a significant time investment and a serious project. For other people, it's just fun, a way to see if they can do it.
I haven't yet seen anyone on NaNo who considered their unedited NaNo effort to be a work of genius or who was disappointed about seeing it rejected. And at the rate of one NaNo a year, a writer would likely have at least two books completed before getting the first one rejected, so there's unlikely to be the same element of "I can't believe they rejected my baby" in the process.
You say that the idea of writing a novel before you were ready was psychologically daunting. The whole point of NaNo is to make the process less psychologically daunting. Isn't that a good thing?
