If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time.

(quote: Arthur Jolly; video: If You're Going to Try from Bukowski's Factotum[NSFW])

November is NaNoWriMO. And as I traffic in words, and talk to people about it, and gravitate to the literary side of the Internet I've been hearing a great deal. People commenting on their idea, on what their schedule will be like, on 'Tips for Motivation'. And if a person wants to give it a whirl, more power to them. But one will never learn to write this way. Writing fiction is not a correspondence course, it is not a discrete series of steps that can be marched through like rehab or learning a piece of software. Coming in dry to a solid month of writing will turn up nothing but a lot of poor writing. There may be pages of brilliance, sure, but the project makes the solemn mistake of isolating writing from one's life. To be any good at this at all, you need to read a tremendous amount. You need to write even more. You need to watch the world around you with the singular purpose of seeking meaning in every little twitch and flitter. You have to go all the way.

I don't mean that one mustn't give it an exploratory shot. Writing is a beautiful, transformative experience. NaNoWriMO is simply not the way to go about it. It cheapens the novel into a Web 2.0, self-esteem generation marketing campaign. It perpetuates the notion that any jackass can pound out a novel; that it is not a hard-learned art like music or painting. But worst of all, it's useless for learning to write. Unless, of course, it's immediately followed by National Edit Your Novel Year. Dabblers should instead write a short story, or even a vignette. Edit it five times. Show it to a friend. Edit it another five times. Leave it alone for awhile as you read incessantly. Edit it a few more times. Learn, actually, how to turn an idea into a story. Learn what your style is. Learn what makes a character pop, or a line of dialogue fall flat. Learn how to construct a story so that a line of causality and emotion runs through it. Learn how to defamiliarize the world. OR waste a month typing something you'll never look at again, because December isn't assigned to writing. It's the holidays or shopping season or whatever, and January is no good because it's cold. And then there's school, and then spring break, summer, and on and on until NaNoWriMo comes around again. . . Write a bit, by all means. But stay off of bandwagons, they're bereft of ideas anyway.


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January 1, 2010 is the print date for my short-story collection. Physical copies will be available shortly after that.