Nanowrimo and Me: Fascinating Screwdrivers

A short personal announcement: I have decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) competition. I’ll be a writing a novel called Fascinating Screwdrivers (the life story of a man who collects crazy things). I’ll also be keeping a weblog diary of my writing progress throughout the month. I’ll be writing it under a pseudonym, Thurston Borgraves.

Nanowrimo, if you recall,  is a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.” You have 30 days to write a 50,000 page in the month of November. (Here’s a podcast interview on the Writing Show with Nanowrimo founder Chris Baty) . In 2006 they had 80,000 participants with 13,000 people writing 50,000 words. Of course, the contest is a little absurd and no one verifies anything; and even if you complete 50,000 words, all you receive is a lousy certificate. Still, there is a feeling of accomplishment, plus bragging rights at cocktail parties.

Although the Nanowrimo forums is agonizingly slow, I was able to discover a mini-community of nanowrimo contestants from Houston. Judging from the number of social events planned for my city alone, one would think that these people are either fulltime socialites, members of a religious cult or Alcoholics Anonymous members making sure you haven’t fallen off the wagon. Truthfully, although I’ll be busy with my own novel, curiosity compels me to attend at least one get-together, if only to see how a nanowrimo cult member behaves in everyday social interactions.

Over the years the Nanowrimo people have fleshed out the nanowrimo concept. November may be novel-writing month, but the next month after that is novel editing month. And inevitably they’ve expanded it to educational activities and the self-publishing industry. Apparently the amount of time needed to revise something is practically identical to the amount of time needed to write something. If the final result is not terribly satisfying, maybe an editor can be brought in to doctor it up a bit.

Actually, these deadline-inspired creative contests didn’t start with nanowrimo. Several 48 hour video contests exist, not to mention dozens of innovative improvisation performances (see in particular the Neo-Futurist’s Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind). These contests can be fun (especially because they are live and structured in a way to reduce audience boredom), but they perpetuate the idea that creative expression is a faucet that can simply be turned on at will. People want to believe in the magical qualities to creativity, thinking it’s simply a matter of setting up a direct phone line with the appropriate muse.

Writers like Kundera have indicted the graphomaniac tendencies of some people and societies. He argues they isolate us:

If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

Kundera’s criticism may simply reflect his own political context, but here in the U.S. we’re pretty much reached the opposite conclusion; keeping a journal on the web brings people together. It may not make writer more gregarious, but it makes the universe of literature more transparent to the general reader. It also increases the number of invisible connections for the author. Any person who keeps up a weblog for long enough will start receiving random emails from strangers–not the crazy kind, but the brilliant and articulate kind that is better-informed than you are. It is humbling, to say the least.

Time will only tell whether nanowrino actually provided the impetus for several great novels. But it has renewed interest in  the novel genre itself. At the very least, writing a crappy novel helps people  appreciate the artistry involved in producing a good one.