Today kicks off the annual writing marathon that is the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The goal for those participating in NaNoWrimo is to write a complete 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I've participated and failed to complete now for two years running, yet I'll be starting on this year's "competition" as soon as I post this entry. Why put myself through the long hours knowing that I could easily hit a two-week stretch without a second to work on the novel, which will basically insure I fail again this year? Part of it is simply that I enjoy the writing process. If I'm working on something for publication, the process can start to feel like work, especially during editing and revision. With NaNoWriMo, participants are pretty much encouraged to turn off their internal editors and embrace the fact that this is going to produce a novel that is likely very bad and not fit for public consumption. That freedom frees the process from all of the outside pressures and lets me return to when I was writing short stories just because a fun idea had come to me, with no intention of trying to get the work published. For those of you who don't write, it might be easier to think of drawing. Lots of people enjoy doodling in a notepad or on the margins of notes from a meeting and it can be a great way to pass the time, but imagine if everything you drew would need to be perfected and then submitted to magazines who may or may not buy the work for publication. The fun of doodling would be gone instantly. NaNoWriMo allows me to return my writing to the doodling stage, to return to the days of creation as play.
And that isn't all. At my core, I'm not a novelist. For my entire life, private and professional, I have been an evangelist for the short story. That is the genre that I first fell in love with as a reader, and it is the one that drives me professionally both as a writer and a professor. Years of trying to learn the art of the short story has destroyed my internal rhythm for writing novel-length work. The little pacing computer in my head simply doesn't have a setting that goes beyond, say, ten thousand words. One of my other goals during the NaNoWriMo process is to change that. Two years ago, my "novel" amounted to little more than a short story cycle like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Last year I got sixteen thousand words into a novel that, by God, felt like a novel. Progress. This year, I have a concept and plan for execution that should produce a novel that actually works. We will see thirty days from now.
America has become defined, in the last few decades, by its consumption rather than its production. Tablet computers failed when they were first rolled out because you couldn't produce anything on the keyboardless monsters. Now, everyone wants an iPad to read and watch movies on, damn producing anything. We can always get other people to do that. I'm already a producer of content as a hobbyist and a proessional, but the final reason that I'm participating in NaNoWriMo is because I love spending a month hanging out with a group of people reveling in the experience of producing something for themselves. I've done my best to encourage everyone around me to join in (and we have a nice little group of participants) because I value the art of creation and, chances are, participating in NaNoWriMo will stoke the creative fires for years to come.
So, good luck from the Nerdbloggers crew to all those participating. Feel free to tweet us with your word counts and the two Nerdbloggers who are participating will do the same.