National Hobbyist-Writer Month…
November 8th, 2011Ah, November. Football, a crisp chill in the air, piles of fallen leaves. And National Novel-Writing Month–”NaNoWriMo”–that amateur-novelist love-fest that always makes me shake my head.
I’m fine with any motivation structure that gets butt in chair to write. And plenty of ‘learned’ or ‘informed’ amateur writers use “NaNoWriMo” to do writing they would be doing anyway. But “NanoWriMo” seems to extend beyond that into a deluge of deluded hobbyists.
There’s nothing wrong with a hobby. I build electric guitars. They don’t come out perfect, and I don’t mind. But I would never claim that my hobby-level work deserves to be paid for or could compete with the work of pro luthiers.
Something about fiction writing seems to attract amateurs. Unlike most hobbies, where you can’t even try them out without having some specialized learning or equipment, many amateur novelists somehow think that anyone who’s had an English class can write a novel. That there’s no need to study or learn. And that their novels, written without any training or insight, will deserve to be bought or to share the shelves with pro authors.
Laura Miller on salon.com last year offers the take of a reader. She’s not a fiction writer and so doesn’t understand the value of butt-in-chair. But she does see through the hoopla of “NaNoWriMo” to the patheticness of deluded hobbyists and the hypocrisy that they’re not reading.
I agree, especially about the reading. To that I’ll add the hypocrisy that they’re not studying writing or trying to learn something about it.
I echo her wish for hobbyist novelists to read instead of trying to write. For those who insist on trying to write, read a good how-to-write book first. Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends is one of the best.
So if not a National Novel-Reading Month, then maybe at least every October could be ‘national read a writing book’ month.
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