–by Tracy Lucas
What’s more important: being perfect or being kind?
Should you encourage writers even though they suck?
This issue has been on my mind today after reading Carolyn Kellogg’s rebuttal article up at the LA Times site today called “12 reasons to ignore the naysayers: Do NaNoWriMo”
In it, Kellogg basically chews the ass of Laura Miller at Salon, who recently called out the wanna-be writers who are jumping on board the NaNo train and told them not to bother. From her article, “Better yet, DON’T write that novel” Miller gives us:
The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.
Here’s why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. “Write Your Novel Here” was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.
“Narcissistic commerce of writing”? Really? I’d worry more about the cultural impact of narcissistic Facebook profiles and navel-gazing Twitter streams. Oh, whatever. Moving on.
Miller also says, though this part I kind of get:
So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say. Writers have a reputation for being tormented by their lot, probably because they’re always moaning so loudly about how hard it is, but it’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.
Okay, so I see what she’s saying.
Readers are important. We’d all be in a different place without them, and without having been readers ourselves. I can grant that.
But I also tend to lean more in the direction of Kellogg’s response:
Literary culture isn’t a temple, it’s an ecosystem. Writers can be readers, readers can be critics, critics can be writers, audiences can have a voice.
and
The too-many-writers trope is echoed by people who publish literary journals, who see more submissions than subscriptions, and those in the publishing industry who’d simply like to sell more books.
And is a large pool of hopeful writers really a terrible thing? Are there not thousands more marathon runners than medalists, more home chefs than pros who might ever run a restaurant kitchen? What’s wrong with an enthusiastic amateur class of writers? Who says they’re not readers, anyway?
But my favorite opinion on the matter (other than that not-a-temple thing above—that line is golden!) actually comes from the comment trail of the Kellogg article. One of her readers, LifesizeLD, writes:
Why are so many people so eager to crush other people’s enthusiasm about something so obviously harmless and potentially wonderful as writing a book in a month?
Writing a novel is hard work. How terrific is it that we can now undertake that effort as part of a supportive community?
It’s kind of ironic that Miller, a WRITER, would spend her time and energy beating down that particular dream.
If you don’t want to write a novel this month, go do something else. Leave us alternatively giddy and frustrated writers to go about our work.
This commenter nails my take on the whole thing. Sure, most of the participants—and even the winners, more than likely—will never do anything professionally with their books. That’s not the point.
It’s just like with my children. I don’t ask for perfection. Perfection is impossible. I ask for improvement. If my two-year-old runs on his own initiative to get the broom after the Cheerios hit the floor, I thank him. I don’t bitch him out because he missed a spot.
And yeah, I know. We’re not the parents of every frustrated writer, and we’re not individually responsible for nurturing everyone else’s dreams. The hippie in me, though, would like to believe we should all watch out for each other.
My friend and colleague Michael Turner told me once about a study he’d read somewhere that said children who are told they worked hard or did a good job fare better than those who are repeatedly told they are smart. The kids, the study proved, better valued the concept of effort and trying again, and the kids who’d been raised to feel everything should come naturally easy got exponentially more frustrated and tended to give up immediately on anything that presented the slightest level of difficulty.
I think writers are the same way. Crafting 50,000 words, be that in a month or a decade, is hard. It’s HARD. The worst pipe dream we could give a fifteen-year-old hopeful or a grandmother with a niggling could-have-been wish is to lie and tell them it’s not. That’s what NaNoWriMo is all about in the first place: Sure, you can try to be a writer. But you have to do the work. Here’s a plan to get you started, and here are some forums to commiserate about it as you go.
I really don’t see that premise as evil or balance-altering to the world of literature at large.
My early stuff blows. Yours does, too. That’s how it works. You can’t be awesome your first time out. It’s true of dating, sex, cooking, writing, and skydiving. Life is a learned response.
Yeah, my life as an editor would be made easier with fewer crappy manuscripts coming across my desk. But you know what? Some of the awesome stuff is written by people who were formerly crappy writers. I’d dare say all of it, in fact. They just kept trucking.
The ones who don’t hold water will fall away on their own. They don’t pose a threat to the more incredible manuscript just below theirs in the stack. I don’t see the point or take joy in telling new writers, especially simple hobbyists, that they suck or that they should just quit already and find a McJob to keep them busy.
The only way to be a better writer is to write. Yeah, you can read self-help books and practice editing and drill yourself on grammar and spelling, and that will all help, but those aren’t going to give your story heart. The experience of creating is. And the best way to gain experience is, voila, by DOING.
So, NaNo or no NaNo, go. DO.
And screw those who try to stop you.
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Have you ever read a real-life story of love? Not one of those decorated love stories, wrapped in adjectives too flowery to connect to any kind of reality, but a love story that grabs you by the hand and drags you sprinting headlong out of town laughing and knowing that this is right, that this is the one?