Why National Novel Writing Month and a Million Penguins Sucks!

I given some thought to the whole idea of National Novel Writing Month. It’s a stupid endeavor to encourage people to write 50,000 words or 175 pages during November. This folly that flies under the guise of encouraging a herd of fledgling writers to write their first novel is wrongheaded in so many ways. First, this volume approach encourages the equivalent of mental diarrhea. Face it that many words is basically a mental dump and I don’t know about you but I don’t associate the word dump with anything that is worth reading. You might say that 2000 words in a day is not really a dump but few people can pace themselves accordingly so in the end it does become a dump. For many of these writers most of the words will be written during one particularly long and bitter weekend.

Furthermore and come on let’s be honest, some of the people writing can barely hold a crayon never mind undertake the writing of a complete novel. So you can anticipate a lot more crap to be hitting the Internet in the weeks ahead. Hell, I know that’s true because some of the crap is of my own volition.

This reminds me of the group effort to write a collaborative wiki-novel called a Million Penguins. Yuk, a group of anonymous writers gets together to write a crappy novel that nobody has a vested personal interest in and they expect somebody to actually read it? Isn’t that what we call a television script? Actually, I read a small piece of it and it’s basically a disjointed mess that you can’t follow. Trust me; don’t waste your time on it until they clean it up a bit.

So does that mean you shouldn’t write or participate in NaNoWriMo? Hell no, this is a democracy and I say go for it. Come on, your crap can’t be any worse that what’s out there already, including mine, right? Some of the most fun I had in life was when I went through a similar exercise two years ago and I wrote 400 pages of my first novel during a one month period in early spring. It was an exhilarating ride I’ll never forget as the ideas poured from my brain in a verbal torrent. Was it any good? Of course not, to this day I’m still cleaning the mess up but the ride was worth it. So give it a shot, you have a right to suck with the rest of us.