In Praise of NaNoWriMo | The Awl

johnlempka:

I think that everyone who I find interesting at all should write a novel, although I feel like whenever I’ve read fiction written by some ‘novice’, it was very obtuse and had nonlinear narratives and botched chronology and stuff, which I guess is reflective of our collective belief that what Choire says, “There is no magic trick to book writing,” is actually untrue.

My grandmother goes through these crazy high periods where she says things like, “I’m gonna write a book about my life.”  When she said that I was all, “You should!”  And she laughed and said, “Can you imagine?” and then she pantomimed an imitation of herself sticking her tongue out and scribbling into a notebook, very intently.  But I really think she should!  I would LOVE to read that.

Maybe not everyone can/would write things that are worth reading.  (That’s probably an understatement.)  But, I think possibly some number of people can/could, and that number is more than the number of people who current do, which is kind of a mini-tragedy, or a great one, depending on your perspective.

(If I can ramble for a bit, because the sun is setting and I’m filled with melancholy and boredom) I agree that everyone (with the least bit of inclination) should write a novel, and society would be much better off for it. Like so many forms of introspection (in many ways the enemy of fundamentalists and political zealots of all stripes), it can be one of life’s great pleasures, but (unlike many others) is not one that falls into the category of immediate gratification (like say, that mammoth black-and-white cookie I just scarfed down). It’s sort of like running a marathon; you have to train to build up to it and maintain some discipline, but ultimately, when you cross the finish line (even if you had to crawl the last __ miles or walk part of the way), you’re going to feel a great sense of accomplishment (even — or especially — if you didn’t win), and for at least a few seconds have some warm fuzzies about being alive and completing something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you. Whether the novel will be ‘good’ or not — much less successful, however you want to define that (but let’s think about it in crass, commercial terms as opposed to a sense of accomplishment) — is a completely different question, and I tend to think that not so many people have it in them to be ‘great’ novelists, much the way only a few runners can ever expect to win a marathon, because I think it requires a certain obsessive personality that falls way outside the boundaries of what most people would consider ‘normal’ and often borders on the psychotic. (Hey!) What I think NaNoWriMo demonstrates (and perhaps to echo Choire’s optimism) is that increasing numbers of people crave some justification to be alone and think about their shit for at least one month of their lives, because society in the modern (i.e., capitalistic) era demands a lot of fucking attention just to survive, and you can easily let your entire life slip away without pondering the (generally unproductive in the economic sense, but intellectually rewarding albeit probably depressing) questions of why we’re even here to begin with, what the purpose of life is, and so on. So yeah, writing any kind of novel is a tiny revolution, and that alone is a reason for hope (and there aren’t too many of those floating around in 2k9, n’est-ce pas?)

2 years ago 19 notes #Sorry #Rambling

19 Notes

  1. trickbop reblogged this from matthewgallaway
  2. matthewgallaway reblogged this from johnlempka and added:
    can ramble for a bit, because the sun is setting and I’m filled with melancholy and boredom) I agree
  3. johnlempka posted this