November Sucks Even Outside Election Years

Omitting the fact that the US presidential campaign season begins in June the previous year at the latest.

NaNoWriMo, which is either an Orwellian state agency or the shorthand version of a really long manga title, begins today. I don't, NaNo I mean, and not just because they're not remotely unyuu enough to use Hinaichigo's sentence-endy word (nano?). It's just you have to start your novel to do it, and I can't leave off working on mine to start another. Also I'm more or less congenitally incapable of writing a story in under 100,000 words, and routinely need twice that. I like stories that sprawl a little, sorry.

I don't know if I disapprove of NNWM (as we are not talking, I will use acronyms, thank you—and if you read it aloud, kindly use the NATO radio alphabet), at least not absolutely. Because it's me, I'm going to list the flaws first. An ordered list counts them automatically!

1. Comparatively unimportant but not all long-form prose fiction is novels, and in fact, virtually all of it that's worth reading isn't.


2. Simply setting length as the standard.
   
   Even accepting that we lump all long prose into "novel", novels, novelas, and novelettes are all one thing, while short stories are something radically different. Everything in a short story points to a particular event—they have only one rising action, climax, and denouement—while a novel contains multiple rising actions, climaxes, and denouements. The structure of a novel is fractal, as the work as a whole also contains a structure like that.
   
   This is a flaw firstly because whether one has written a "novel" (here, again, meaning "long form prose fiction") is not length, but structure. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a short story, but it's as long as a short novel.


3. Secondly it is a flaw because NaNo-ers will write filler to get their word-count up. Paying by the word makes sense for magazines, since they have pages to fill, but did you know they used to size poetry by the inch? Yep, poetry—which makes prose look like duct-tape in the pretensiousness department—was sold by the inch, like twine. Should we really be using that as the standard?


4. Relatedly, the word-count standard does, in fact, reward people with a verbose style, and some people write better in a spare one.
   
   Modern English style is in dire need of red-shifting, in general. I don't have the statistics by me, but hasn't there been a spike in skin-cancer? Maybe it's the currently popular ultraviolet prose that's to blame.


5. A lot of people just use NNWM as an outlet for their urge to write. Which, for most people, is fine. But some people really have what it takes to write well, and it's never a good idea to let talented people feel that their ambitions are satisfied, unless they actually are (in a way that benefits the rest of us—guess what, your talents are irrelevant to anyone else unless the anyone else can benefit from them).
   
   We need more good writers out there, folks, and I don't know if it's a good idea to make them feel like they've "won" until their books are really in print.


6. Relatedly, apparently, publishers hate this time of year, because silly people—90% of whom, viz. Sturgeon's Law, should just be using NNWM as a private outlet for their creativity—send in their NaNo work as soon as it's done. Apparently, like, in December. Without rewrites.
   
   Yeah, know what, the other writers don't need you making the publishers cranky.

Wow, so, six problems. I'm as surprised as you that that's all the negativity I could find.

On the other hand, though, there is one thing, one big thing, to say in NNWM's favor. The thing does get people to shut up about writing, and write. And that, of course, is how you do it. Very Zen.

I think I'm gonna have to write a little every day this month, though not on a NaNo project and not toward an arbitrary 50 kiloword target. But writing every day in a month ain't a bad idea.