Back from Philcon, which was (sur­prise!) a blast. Apart from get­ting to handle a custom

Darth Myke

made Sith-tuned light saber, I got to reunite with old friends, make new ones and spend hours shooting the breeze with Cory Doc­torow about making a living from writing and a room full of George R.R. Martin fans about how much we love A Song of Ice and Fire.

This is my JOB folks. We’re talking, tax write off. I must have done some­thing incred­ible in a past life.

But, anyway, all my blog entries seem to be about how great it is to be in nerd heaven, so let’s shift gears and take a dis­senting view.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoW­riMo) is just wrap­ping up (it’s November of every year, I think). It’s a neat Internet driven meme that chal­lenges folks to write 50,000 words in a single month.

Here’s what I like about it:

- It stresses rigor, dis­ci­pline and reg­u­larity in art. Once you commit to NaNoW­riMo, you’re going to be pulling some late nights to get your word count in. 1,700 words a day for most folks is going to mean treating your hobby like a paying job (you don’t go to bed until the work is done).

- It kick­starts folks who have been looking for an excuse to take a step off that ledge and start a novel.

- It has a cool sense of com­mu­nity and brings like-minded folks together.

Here’s what I don’t like about it (and mind you, this comes from the per­spec­tive of a traditional/Stackpolean “House Slave” writer. If you’re writing for fun, or plan to self-publish, then this may not be as rel­e­vant to you):

- 50,000 words isn’t a novel. While there aren’t hard bottom limits, my gen­eral sense has always been that 80,000 words is around the min­imum length for novels pub­lished by the “Big 6.” I am sure there are excep­tions, but I keep thinking it should be called NaHaNoWriMo.

- It encour­ages people to write quickly. I think this is the single biggest problem that begin­ning writers face and was the thing that kept me from going pro for the longest time. I *still* struggle to slow myself down and con­cen­trate on per­fec­tion over word count. Pro­ducing 3,000 meh words pales in com­par­ison to pro­ducing 10 good ones. In the end, it is QUALITY rather than quan­tity and speed, that counts in pro­ducing suc­cessful writing (I wrote a blog post on this very topic a while ago). All of my favorite writers (George R.R. Martin, Patrick Roth­fuss, Peter V. Brett, Richard K. Morgan) are SLOW. They go ages between books. While I haven’t spoken to all of them per­son­ally, I have spoken to some of them, and the common thread I am finding is that they are per­fec­tion­ists. Dead­lines or no, they do not turn in work until they know it is the very, very best they can pro­duce. I firmly believe that atti­tude is the dif­fer­ence between world-changing writers like GRRM and mid-listers or aspi­rants who can’t get a book deal. I see blog posts and web­sites with meters that mea­sure word count all the time. What I rarely see are indi­ca­tors of the quality of those words.

I can see why NaNoW­riMo is pop­ular and I cer­tainly don’t bash it, but its focus on quan­tity and speed rather than quality of output may be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Maybe December should be Edit-The-Crap-Out-Of-The-50K-Words-I-Just-Wrote-Month.