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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31052
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31052
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

People are motivated by competition. We can do more, often much more, when we have others to compare ourselves against. In the Tour de France, riders ride in teams. Each lead rider has a team of ten or so teammates to set the pace for them. In any competition, athletes do better when competing against the best opposition. If you think you are running as fast as you can and someone passes you, you may find that you actually can run faster, but you never would have done without the competition to motivate you and show you it is possible.

A big part of NANOWRIMO (as I understand from friends that have done it) is comparing your pace against others. You probably can't churn out 50000 words of fiction in 30 days working in isolation, but if you see the person next to you is two thousand words ahead of you, you dig deeper and find the extra energy to churn out an extra 600 words a day, or whatever it takes.

This kind of competition naturally requires defined parameters. All the runners have to start the race at the same time and compete over the same distance. So NANOWRIMO establishes the course to be run and the start time and provides a way of telling how you are doing against the other runners. It creates the environment in which you can push yourself to greater achievement.

That, I think, is the main reason for it. It's not a case of "why, if someone can write 2000 words a day, seven days a week, they need NaNoWriMo?" It is a case of creating the conditions under which a person who cannot write 2000 words a day in isolation can be spurred on to do so by competition from other writers.

Now personally I think this is mostly bosh. The challenge is not to churn out 2000 words a day, which is really not all that many. The challenge is to generate that many ideas to write about. Perhaps, to some extent, the pressure to get out the words pushes the mind to invent the ideas, but it is obviously the course of least resistance to push out verbose descriptions of lame and derivative ideas, and no doubt that is what 99.9 percent of all NANOWRIMO writing is. I suspect that the people who have been successful with it, and there have been some, started with a good worked out idea in mind on November 1.

Nor am I persuaded much by the argument that people just need a spur to actually write. If you don't feel compelled to write, don't write. There are better, more lucrative, and more socially useful ways to spend your time. Not being motivated to write is a blessing, not a curse. Embrace it. No commodity in the world is in a greater state of oversupply these days than fiction manuscripts. Not writing them is a boon to humanity.

Original score: 3