Welcome to Friday Debate, a feature on cup of tea with that book, please, where every Friday a question will be posted that tantalize the brain and expands our horizons. For this week’s question:
November is National Novel Writing Month or in short, NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know, this is the month where writers try to tap into their creativity and try to write a novel in a month. Many claim that NaNoWriMo is a great way to create a community of writers and a chance to discover the great things they can do with their writing.
But there are some who believe that NaNoWriMo hinders the writing process. Writers are more focused on completing their goal of writing 50,000 words in a month than creating a worthy novel. Read what San Diego author, Jennifer Coburn, had to say about it:
Imposing a one-month deadline on myself to write a book would only add to my anxiety.” Coburn is the author of eight books. “The fastest I’ve ever completed a draft was four months, and that was a miracle. Usually it takes me a year. And really, what’s the rush? Why one month? I feel like NaNoWriMo focuses on the wrong thing. Writing a book in a month is not the goal; producing a quality novel should be.”
So for this week’s Friday Debate, I am asking these two questions:
Please post any comments you have in the section below.
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My view on NaNoWriMo is that if it works for you, go for it. If it hinders you, don’t bother.
I find it helpful to have something that “forces” me to produce a certain amount when I write a first draft. The structure and the support and the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be “good” are very freeing. But I wouldn’t show anyone anything I wrote during NaNoWriMo without significant editing, revising and rewriting. I wrote the first draft of Beautiful, my novel, about 4 years ago during NaNoWriMo. Then I rewrote it many times before publishing it this past summer. I found initial NaNoWriMo to be helpful in the “something from nothing” stage of the novel. But in terms of producing something of quality, that took more time.