Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash
If you’re a writer and you belong to any sort of writing community — in person, online, it doesn’t matter — about this time of year you start hearing the murmurs of NaNoWriMo.
I know it’s only September, and National Novel Writing Month is in November — but people start talking about it as soon as the leaves start to change.
And it doesn’t even matter if you want to try to write 50,000 words in thirty days.
It certainly doesn’t matter whether you want to hear about other writers preparing to bang their heads against their keyboards in abstract misery for the whole month of November.
If you’re a writer, you find yourself caught up in the energy because suddenly everyone and their mother and their next door neighbor and the girl who made your coffee is getting ready for NaNoWriMo.
My professional opinion, as a published novelist and a teacher, is that NaNoWriMo sucks.
I mean, it has its place (I’ll get to that in a minute), but as a method for becoming a real, working writer? Not so much.
NaNoWriMo sucks. For two reasons.