Writing, like anything else, is a craft. So, let us pick a craft at random, oooh, blacksmithing.
Not being a blacksmith or even a trainee blacksmith I, unsurprisingly, know very little about blacksmithing.
However, Wikipedia knows a fair bit, so let’s take some time to learn something about it:
“A blacksmith is a person who creates objects from iron or steel by forging the metal; i.e., by using tools to hammer, bend, cut, and otherwise shape it in its non-liquid form.”
Hmm, sounds complicated, and I bet you couldn’t do it without practising for a good year or so first. Maybe you could turn out a rudimentary weapon, like a big club, if you were to just pick up the tools now and go for it, but no-one would be interested in buying it, because it would be a truly terrible club. And really, no-one would give a toss that you’d even bothered to try, apart from the blacksmith whose tools you would have ruined in your ridiculous and haughty attempt to perform a job you know nothing about.
So, in a dashing Socratic application of logic I will now ask you why, if writing is also a craft, people think they can be masters of it without putting in any time or effort?
This simple answer is because they are fools.
The biggest expression of this foolishness used to be in the “slogan” (I don’t want to grace it with the title “proverb” or “maxim”) that “everyone has a novel in them”. But not anymore.
National Novel Writing Month, or as it prefers to be called NaNoWriMo – an appropriate abbreviation considering that its raison d'être is to dissuade people from wasting time by writing things properly – is, in its own words:“A fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing”
Hmm. A lot of crap. A good thing? Let’s get all Socratic again and apply the NaNoWriMo ethos to say, cooking.
Ok, so this is a literal seat-of-your-pants approach to cooking called Cooking Properly Is So Stupid, or CokPISS for short.
“The goal of CokPISS is to prepare a meal in under one minute. Valuing nothing that any decent chef would deem worthwhile, participants are encouraged to just chuck as much food as they can find in a container and then microwave it all for a minute. You will develop dysentery and produce a lot of crap afterwards, but that’s a good thing.”
Now, I’ve never had dysentery, but I hardly think it’s a good thing. And if you disagree, try telling that to the Members of the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters network who travelled to Burma (Myanmar) in June 2008 to try to stop an outbreak of the disease in the towns of Labutta and Bogalay.
All in all, crap is bad. So why does NaNoWriMo encourage its production?
It seems to me that NaNoWriMo is a product of the times we live in and a reflection of our waning insistence on quality. From the “I want it now” attitude that emanated from fast food to the instant success stories of X-Factor , via blogging, the proliferation of information on the internet and even Strictly Come Dancing’s insinuations that a skill can be mastered in weeks, we are being led a merry dance by institutions who wish to convince us that we not only have the aptitude to be, but deserve to be instant stars.
Shirley Dent, Communications Director for the Institute of Ideas and a Guardian columnist, takes this notion a step further: “What we are dealing with here is…a cultural milieu that promotes a childish, indulgent idea of self-expression, where it doesn't matter what it is you are saying, or if you have any talent at all as a writer, as long as you are expressing yourself. This has less to do with personality foibles and more to do with what society values about literature and culture.”
Dent goes on to call NaNoWriMo “the hideous aesthetic spawn of cultural relativism and a culture of self-esteem, where criticism is frowned upon,” and in doing so she strikes upon one of the same themes as the NaNoWriMo advocate Jeff Printy, aka Dr Wicked.
Wicked, creator of the internet writing tool “Write or Die,” claims that: “Writing Does Not Have To Be Hard [sic],” although punctuating a sentence correctly apparently is. “The creature inside you that makes it hard is not the Creator, it is the Critic, holding you back and telling you it's not good enough.”
The Creator and the Critic, eh? Tell us more Wicked.
“If you had the apparatus to look inside the head of any creative person you would find twin beasts; we will call these the Creator and the Critic. The problem occurs when the Creator sits down to create; the Critic cannot differentiate between the process and the product and therefore begins to make loud comments about how horrible this creation is and how it could be so much better.”
Towards this end Wicked created the aforementioned “Write or Die”, which unfortunately doesn’t quite follow through on its promise of annihilating its users. Instead the repressed geniuses log on to the webpage, set either a word count or a time limit and a way of being punished whenever his or her prodigious talent pauses for breath.
Yet Jean Hannah Edelstein, a freelance journalist who writes for Bad Idea magazine, disagrees with Wicked’s distaste for the Critic: “I think that the best writers are the most mature ones in that they are able to look at their own work with a criticial eye, accept outside criticism, and regard their work as a job rather than some kind of ethereal calling.”
Something that can actually make you die is smoking, which the prize-winning novelist James Kelman has acknowledged in his work on numerous occasions. Furthermore, according to Kelman: “As with writing, smoking can be an enjoyable solitary pursuit.”It is the value of the “solitary” aspect of writing that seems to have gone astray among the NaNoWriMo-philes of this world, as Wicked concedes: “Ask just about anyone who is participating about their favourite aspect of NaNoWriMo and they will say the community, the people that they meet through the forums and the write-ins.”
Yet it is the idea of writing as a primarily solitary act that needs to be brought back to the fore, as Dent recognises: “With writing, there is great confusion - it has come to be seen as expression rather than art, and that anyone and everyone can do it.
“We have devalued what literature is by not arguing for the very best literature, and for the excellence of some literature in comparison with the rest.”
Yet for the Wickeds of this world literature is a mass event that everyone can take part in: “I think everyone dreams of becoming an Author [sic] because it is the one thing that every literate person is capable of doing.”
But what might Socrates have said to this? “Are all numerate persons capable of expounding on discrete mathematics? Are all swimmers capable of swimming in the Olympics? Are all cars capable of competing on the Formula One circuit simply because they have four wheels?”
As Edelstein comments: “We all have a book in us to the extent that we all have a life story which could ostensibly be written down, but very few people have the capability to write a book that is actually of interest to anyone besides them and possibly their mother (although it could be that she is just trying to be nice).
“This only becomes a problem when people become fixated upon the possibility of getting published because they perceive it to be the only way in which their hobby will be validated. Sometimes you may have to concede that you are not meant to be a famous writer but rather someone who writes for his or her own personal pleasure.”
Tragically, the number of NaNoWriMo participants has increased year-on-year since its inception in 1999, and there’s a good chance that way more than the 101,510 people who entered in 2007 are fixated upon dragging the good name of the novel further through the gutter before they desist.
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