It may just be me…okay, no it’s not: NaNoWriMo has been taken over by plotters. The original annual seat-of-the-pants writing extravaganza is now full up with people who can’t make a move without an outline and hyperventilate if their story starts to deviate from its pre-planned track a few chapters in. For a ‘competition’ that’s supposed to be about spending 30 days writing with wild abandon, I’m not seeing a whole lot of wild abandon anymore – more like quick but thoughtful plodding and a shit-ton of dos, don’ts, and didactic instructions. NaNo has turned into every other writers’ gathering you’d run into everywhere else in any other month of the year.
And I hate that.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love NaNoWriMo. I love the concept, and the No Plot No Problem book* that told us all about it. I love pushing myself to write fast and hard for 30 days. I love squeezing in time to frantically write in between turkey bastings and dinner-roll baking and side-dish shenanigans after wasting half my morning watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And I love every single fabulous thing I’ve come up with thanks to having to throw any sort of second-guessing to the winds and just pull wordy prose out of my ass as fast as I can every November.
What I hate is seeing NaNo becoming less and less of a wild enchanted wood every year and more and more an endless parade of HOA-constrained suburban flowerbeds. It was inevitable that this was going to happen, of course. When something becomes popular it becomes mainstream, and once it becomes mainstream all of those rough edges and crazy colors and flights of wild fancy that drew us to it in the first place must be smoothed down and subdued and tethered close to the ground to make this newly-wanted thing accessible and acceptable to as many people as possible. And in this case, those people were the plotters, the outliners, the ‘traditional writers’, and the people who get into heated arguments over the use of Oxford commas.
You know, the people who really needed to experience the wild abandon of NaNoWriMo the most.
* I was going to link to this book on Amazon – I have it, it’s good, you’d probably like it – but when I went over there to get the link all but one of the Also Bought recommendations were for books about how to outline your novel, structure your novel, and/or write faster. Because of course they were. I think I’m going to go have some cocoa, re-read Usher II, and then go to bed to dream sweet dreams about forcing prim and proper literary pedants to watch people misuse apostrophes until their heads explode. 😀