The always thoughtful lmarley is teaching a writing workshops for teens next week, and she posted her thoughts about National Novel Writing Month.  She asked, "How does this exercise teach you how to 'learn and master' style and craft and pacing? If you don't revise, rewrite, edit, and examine, what improves?" 

Her questions got me thinking about the value of sprinting through a 50,000 word month:

I don't think the NaNoWriMo helps much at all with craft and pacing, but I do think there is some value in discovering voice. One of the big problems I see with wannabe writers is that they just haven't produced much, and what they do produce is overthought. Where I see this most clearly is in my creative writing classes where I have them keep 1,000-word-a-week journals. The stories they turn in can be tortured, stilted and mechanical, but their journals often have passages (sometimes very long passages) of smooth, readable, interesting and even compelling language.

I think the difference comes from their mindset and the process. When they are writing for me, they are thinking about all they know about writing and about me as a critical reader. They seize up, write slowly, and kill their voice. But when they write in their journals (especially after we've been doing them for a couple of weeks), they are writing quickly and for themselves.

NaNoWriMo puts writers more into that journal writing mindset. It's okay if it's bad. It just has to be done, and in the midst of trying to get it done, passages with real voice emerge. What they learn from the process is not only to get words on the page, but also to write from a more direct place in themselves--not the heavily filtered place where they normally wring their sentences.

The editing that comes later will be about picking out the good, adjusting the not so good, and tossing away the bad, but they can't do the editing if they don't produce something to edit first.

The cartoon is from the very funny writer and artist, Debbie Ridpath Ohi.  She has lots of other insightful writing illustrations at her site.