Thursday, October 17, 2019

NaNoWriMo - Good or Bad

It's that time of year when a lot of writers dive on board to do NaNoWriMo. For those of you not familiar with this program, the goal is to write a novel in one month. You set word count goals and just write like crazy!

While this is a motivating factor for a lot of writers, I have heard and seen, time and time again, that the goal of just getting words on the page becomes counter productive to writing quality work. Sure, the NaNoWriMo people will proclaim the number of people who published a novel from this, but when you really dig into it, you see that the focus on word count is missing the point.

So, if you ask me, is NaNoWriMo a good program, I personally would say no, or at least in the present way it is done.

Here is the biggest problem with the program. It is all about word count. They openly say that it doesn't matter of the writing is good or bad, so long as you get the words on the page. They go on to say, you can edit later. And this is the problem! The odds are that many of the days, you will write material that will likely be dumped. Consider that time wasted.

Sure, you might want to argue that it "got you thinking" or "writing even bad material is practice" but the reality of the business of publishing is that we have deadlines and wasting an entire day of writing garbage is not going to get you anywhere.

I do think setting deadlines for yourself during this month is great! But, if you are going to do this, make sure the material you write is quality work.

Just my point of view!

No comments:

Post a Comment