Day +1, word count: 75,053, target: 50,000

It’s December 1st.  NaNoWriMo is officially over.

One of the negative things that comes about in November is the occasional article that attempts to dismiss all things NaNoWriMo as just a bunch of people believing they’re bestselling authors based on jotting down random scribblings of nonsense, as if we didn’t know that we’re deluding ourselves.

The argument seems to stem from the notion that NaNoWriMo lets you write 50,000 words of utter rubbish in November.  You’re encouraged to lock away your inner editor and just bash out the words, regardless of whether they’re any good.

It’s true that NaNoWriMo encourages you to lock away your inner editor and write the first 50,000 words that come into your head but, and here’s the crux of the matter, it’s not compulsory to do either.  Nowhere does it state that you must produce 50,000 words of nonsense.  Nowhere does it state that you’ll be hung, drawn, and quartered if you accidentally write something that’s good.

At its heart, the NaNoWriMo rules are simple – write 50,000 words in a month.  That’s it.  The idea is that many people feel that they have a story to tell, and that this story will forever remain locked away in their heads if they don’t get an “excuse to write”.  NaNoWriMo is that excuse.  Maybe you’ll find out that the story was rubbish and you never visit it again after November.  Maybe you’ll discover that the story only has 20,000 words in it.  Maybe you’ll think it’s the best thing ever while everyone else thinks it’s rubbish.  It really doesn’t matter.  Until you get the words down, you don’t know what you have in your head.

Once November is over, you can look back on those words and decide if you have something that’s worth continuing with, or if you really can’t do anything with it.  Maybe you read those 50,000 words and find out that they’re just fine with a bit of editing – you couldn’t edit them before they were written.  That’s what NaNoWriMo did for you.  Maybe you’ll read those words and realise that what you’ve written is mostly awful, but there’s a gem of an idea in there and some half-decent characters that you can shape and mould into a good foundation for a better story.  That’s what NaNoWriMo did for you.  Maybe you’ll be the only one that ever reads what you’ve written, or that you’ll be the only one that’ll ever enjoy it.  It doesn’t matter.  That’s what NaNoWriMo did for you.

The whole point of NaNoWriMo is that you can’t edit your work, or shape your story, or build foundations, unless you’ve actually written the words in the first place.  NaNoWriMo never promises that you’ll be published.  It only promises you that you’ll write.  Something.  Anything.  NaNoWriMo is the start of the journey, or the continuation of a previous journey.  It’s not the end of the journey, and it never will be.

Negative articles that dismiss NaNoWriMo on the grounds of “quality over quantity” base their argument on the notion that the end of NaNoWriMo is the end of the journey.  It isn’t.  It was never meant to be.  It never will be.  NaNoWriMo is nothing more than a kick in the pants to the budding author that hasn’t written a word before.  For the rest of us, NaNoWriMo is a kick in the pants that we need to get back into writing after an extended absence.

309,101 people participated in NaNoWriMo in 2013.  Is every one of them deluded, as the negative articles suggest?  Or, just maybe, they know something that the naysayers don’t.