Does NaNoWriMo Create Too Many Bad Books? Or, a Manifesto on the New Social Literacy

Does NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) encourage a glut of crappy books that would be better off unwritten?

Laura Miller wrote a now infamous article at Salon:

Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it’s likely to produce more novels I’d want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.) 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.

…Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there — more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so. This is not to say that I don’t hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement. (Actually, there are more of those novels than I’ll ever be able to read, as well.) Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it. But I’m confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.

Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

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.

I love her article because it’s like those 19th Century sermons justifying slavery. It’s so full of wrong-headed nonsense that it’s downright inspiring.

The first question that comes to mind is, even if NaNoWriMo filled the world with books, so what? As Nerdshares asked,

Is it sad that Twilight exists? I don’t know. I don’t like it. I think it’s legitimately an awful piece of work, but I also don’t know that I’d feel comfortable telling Stephenie Meyer to stick her manuscripts in a drawer because it’s no good so why try? (I think because this, which Laura Miller doesn’t seem to understand, is what we would call being an asshole.)

And Carolyn Kellogg provided an excellent point by point rejoinder.

But I think Pop Matters addressed the condescension best.

Miller seems to suggest that it’s wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller’s counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters.

So why do we keep hearing that there are too many books? If it’s not NaNo that’s being derided, it’s some other phenomena, like the Kindle. Dana Gioia and Jonathan Franzen are fretting that an ereader like the Kindle, “will not make a significant positive impact, however well it does business-wise.” Franzen thinks you can read travel books on the Kindle, but not Kafka. (Which is weird, because I thought Kafka wrote travel books. Something about touring castles? Or maybe it was penal colonies? Anyway, I read Kafka while I was touring Europe, and it sure would have helped to have it on my Kindle. And in English.)

Or alternatively, it’s self-publishing that is blamed for an anticipated tsunami of awful books. Oh my goodness, that was Laura Miller in Salon also. “Again, these developments are in many ways great for authors. Readers, however, may be in for a serious case of slush fatigue.”

But Miller isn’t the only one desperate to save readers from being overwhelmed by having too much to read. In a great article on a completely different subject (the lost art of rejection letters — it’s really interesting!) Bill Morris suddenly and inexplicably declares:

We need fewer books, and better ones; we need more readers, and smarter ones. And I believe the former would lead to the latter.

I couldn’t disagree more.

An individual does not become a good writer by writing less, but by writing more, by writing and writing and writing. It’s said that you have to write a million words of dreck before you can master the craft. If that’s true of writers in the singular, why wouldn’t it be true of writers in the plural? Why wouldn’t it be true of a civilization?

Countries that win the Olympics year after year are countries that have the most athletes practicing those sports, not just at the Olympic level but across the board. Thousands and thousands of amateur athletes are needed if a country is to produce just a few gold-medalists.

The same is true of inventions. You don’t just invent the airplane by favoring only one or two of the smartest inventors. You have as many inventors, smart and moronic and everything in between, striving to fly. They learn from each other and they compete with each other and they spur each other on. Soon you’re flying.

If every person in the world wrote a book, that would be awesome, wouldn’t it? I think it would. The very people who are the least likely to write a book are holding secret inside them some of the books I would most like to read. The African mother who would, if she could, leave a story for her child before she dies of AIDS and leaves the child an orphan. The Russian dude who could tell me what it’s really like to go from working for the KGB to an independent mafia. And then there are all the imagined worlds which I can’t even imagine because only someone else could. I wish I could read those books. Why don’t Miller and Morris?

I think they fear more books because a couple of different issues are operating here.

(1) No one reader can read everything. People who have an obsessive-compulsive desire to read every book ever written (I really sympathize with this) can find it frustrating that the task is already IMPOSSIBLE but just keeps getting more so because darn authors keep writing more. Just look at the number of books selling more than 100,000 copies I listed in a previous post. Have you read all of those? Neither have I.

(2) If you are an author (as Miller, Morris, Franzen etc. are) then all those new books being written during NaNo, published through Smashwords and read on ereaders are COMPETITION. Of course authors don’t want more competition. Even though Konrath claims it’s not a competition. Readers are finite, with finite reading time. It’s hard not to worry that with so many other good books out there, ours would get overlooked.

Notice that the real problem, then, is not that there might be too many BAD books out there. The problem is that there might be too many GOOD books out there. There are wonderful books you won’t have time to read. That is heartbreaking, isn’t? And someone else might have written a much, much better book than you. In fact, probably hundreds of authors have written better books than you.

And yet, there is one more important truth:

No one but you can write your book.

Unlike Miller, I think that would be a loss. Because unlike the naysayers, who think literate culture is on the brink of self-implosion, I think we are in the midst of a wonderful renaissance of literature. Historians centuries from now will look back on our era and marvel at the burst of creativity. They will point to the huge number of novels, both horrendous and gorgeous, the flurry of interest ordinary people, not even professional writers, are taking in learning how to write novels, the communities, like NaNoWriMo (but not limited to it) that have sprung up to make writing novels a social activity.

Let me repeat that… writing novels is a social activity. Look, that is astonishing. Hey, let’s be friends: we’ll all write 50,000 words expressing our deepest feelings in the form of a story and share it with one another. This is art; this is friendship; this is community; this is amazing. I love human beings for doing this.

We are not becoming an illiterate culture. We are becoming more imbricated with the written word than ever. Our daily social lives revolve around the written word more than ever before. No wonder more people than ever, not less, are reading.

Do let us share our novels with one another. Do let us buy the books our friends write, and read them, and write about them, and be inspired by them. Do let us create a community of the written word to communicate our soul aches and heart breaks and dream aims through the secret language of story — both the oldest and now the newest way to share with one another.