Disclosure: I rarely (intenionally) write fiction, but I am a writer.
I agree with nrivkis: NaNoWriNo is no threat to professional writers (or the profession), but the NaNoWriNo people did say some awfully stupid things in their promotion.
But there is an aspect of the NaNoWriNo approach that puzzles me. Their emphasis is on getting a first draft -- crap to be sure, but a complete draft sans editing nonetheless -- written so that, presumably, you can proceed to refining it. But is that the way people write? It's not the way I write, but I'm just one person. My first draft never sparkles, but it's never crap either; I edit along the way, and again when I have something reasonably solid. My edit filter is always on; I don't leave bad writing to fix later. I might, on the other hand, leave sentences like "[discuss such-and-such here]" for later; I don't necessarily start at the beginning and go to the end.
As a benchmark, this comment is written at about my "acceptable first draft" level; I fixed a few typos and one bad sentence construction that tried to slip in, but I haven't done any more editing than that. And I inserted my disclosure, the first line of the comment, about halfway through writing this.
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Date: 2003-10-22 01:17 pm (UTC)I agree with
But there is an aspect of the NaNoWriNo approach that puzzles me. Their emphasis is on getting a first draft -- crap to be sure, but a complete draft sans editing nonetheless -- written so that, presumably, you can proceed to refining it. But is that the way people write? It's not the way I write, but I'm just one person. My first draft never sparkles, but it's never crap either; I edit along the way, and again when I have something reasonably solid. My edit filter is always on; I don't leave bad writing to fix later. I might, on the other hand, leave sentences like "[discuss such-and-such here]" for later; I don't necessarily start at the beginning and go to the end.
As a benchmark, this comment is written at about my "acceptable first draft" level; I fixed a few typos and one bad sentence construction that tried to slip in, but I haven't done any more editing than that. And I inserted my disclosure, the first line of the comment, about halfway through writing this.