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Category: NaNoWriMo

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Perfectly pure art

It’s not about money, and nobody gets to say whether it’s good or bad. Too bad more art isn’t like NaNoWriMo.
Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, c. 1670–71, Johannes Vermeer, National Gallery of Ireland
November might be our month to express gratitude, but it’s also NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. My third daughter has been participating since she was in high school. Now, her younger brother also spends the month of November writing a novel.
“I might as well do it while I still can,” is their rationale. That reflects a sad view of adulthood in America. Young people see their mid-twenties as the end of all self-actualization, when in truth it ought to be just the beginning.
I’ve mostly interacted with NaNoWriMo as a mom. My kids knew that, “I can’t rake leaves, Mom, I’m short on my word count,” stood a pretty good chance of working.
Occasionally one of my older friends takes a swing at NaNoWriMo. This year it’s a retired religious who’s in palliative care in Jerusalem. She’s the survivor of two different cancers, breast and adult Ewing sarcoma, and she has lots of professional experience writing and editing. It’s been interesting to watch her struggle with the NaNoWriMo challenge.
Paul Alexis Reading to Émile Zola, 1869–1870, Paul CĂ©zanne, Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo
Since 2006, almost 400 NaNoWriMo novels have been picked up and published by publishing houses. These include the best-seller Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. More have been successfully self-published. (A complete list is available here.) Recently, winners have received five free, paperback proof copies of their manuscripts that they can use for marketing. They’re also encouraged to do revisions in a “Now What?” month, where published authors help them polish up their work for submission.
NaNoWriMo focuses on the doing, not the quality of the results. A winner is a person who completes their 50,000-word work in the one-month window. “If you believe you’re writing a novel, we believe you’re writing a novel too,” says their website.
The participation rate is huge. This year, 441,184 people are participating, from all over the globe. There will be about 40,000 winners. These people will write 1,667 words a day, every day, for thirty days straight. That’s a lot of words. It supports what art teachers often say: inspiration lies in methodical disciplined action, not in some mad flash of genius.
As with so much other crowd-sourcing, NaNoWriMo was only possible after the development of the internet diffused the power of traditional publishing. It’s popular with young people. I expect that their tastes and style, coupled with this engine of quick distribution, will create a period of great achievement in literature.
Young Man Writing, 1650-1675, Jacob van Oost, MusĂ©e d’arts de Nantes
I don’t need to read my son’s story; he’s already told it to me. As he talked, I smiled at his vocabulary and word structure. He’s always been good with language, but I’m sure these forays into forced-march fiction have influenced how he thinks and speaks.
Complete works don’t just fall out of your head onto the paper, whether they’re painted or written. They’re clawed out in great chunks, then endlessly revised. Painting or writing may be intensely satisfying but they’re also hard work.
We humans love to spin stories, and we love to hear them. I love NaNoWriMo because it celebrates that inventive human spirit. I love it because it’s never been mostly about the business of art, but about the simple joy of creativity. I love it because nobody’s appointed themselves the arbiter of what’s good or bad. Too bad more art isn’t like that.
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The Yes Man

The artist at work…
November is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, when a quarter million Americans sign up to write a novel in a month. This is my daughter’s maddest, gladdest time of the year. She is remarkably disciplined, setting herself a goal of around 1700 words a day and consistently meeting it. (She’s a third-year engineering major, but has been doing this since she was in middle school.)
This year she’s skewering Regency conventions. Occasionally she looks up from her nest on the couch to read a particularly funny passage aloud, and then dissolves into laughter.
Unlike Mary, I’m allergic to hard work. Here’s the synopsis of the novel I would have written if I weren’t such a slug:
The Yes Man is an Asian businessman whose English skills are non-existent. He’s very polite and agreeable; thus he’s the victim of every confidence man and siding salesman in town. His Dutiful Daughter spends countless hours canceling contracts and services on his behalf. Some are simple enough to get out of; some—like Dish TV—would try the patience of a saint.
One day, the Yes Man signs an insurance policy that offers to pay him $10,000 for the loss of a leg, $30,000 for the loss of both legs, and a similar indemnity for his arms. The policy has one of those ridiculous riders that pay several times the damages if the accident is caused by something extremely improbable: in this case it is elephants.
“Dad, this is so stupid!” rages Dutiful Daughter. “You’re in Rochester now! There are no elephants here. Have you ever seen an elephant here?” The Yes Man simply smiles and agrees with her.
Dutiful Daughter calls the agency and gets stuck in an endless phone queue. She never gets to speak to a human. Left messages are never returned.
The next day the Yes Man is walking to his restaurant at the same time as the Circus Train arrives at Clinton Street. The elephants line up trunk-to-tail for their traditional amble to the auditorium. And somehow, for the first time in history, they are spooked. The Yes Man ends up being trampled and loses both legs below the knees.
I love a happy ending. (Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

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