By Beth (Jaden) Terrell

Last week, I said I was going to write about pen names today, but my attention has been commandeered by the usual assortment of "I Hate NaNoWriMo, and If You Don't, You're An Idiot" posts that sprout all over the internet at this time of year. Like this one, called "Better Yet, DON'T WRITE THAT NOVEL" by Laura Miller at Salon.com.

I'm not the first person this week to address Miller's bitter diatribe, and I considered not doing so at all, largely because of the sneaking suspicion that her primary motivation was a desire for a lot of clicks and comments on her blog. Then I thought, well, if these posts spring up every year, making the same wrong-headed assumptions, maybe more of us need to respond.

Also, I'm not averse to more clicks and comments on this blog. Please, come right in, click and comment to your heart's content.

Miller opens with a paragraph saying she greets the end of October with trepidation, because she knows NaNoWriMo is about to begin. Paragraph 2 begins: NaNoWriMo was started back in 1999 as a motivational stunt for a small group of writer friends.

Note the snark. Why a stunt? Is a group of friends getting together at the gym to help motivate each other a "stunt?" Why is a group of friends deciding to encourage each other to write a novel any different? In 1999, there were no media releases, no hoopla, no nothing, just some friends encouraging each other to do something they'd always wanted to do. In what way does this even vaguely resemble a "stunt?" But the tone is set.

It's since become a nonprofit organization with staff, sponsors, a fundraising gala and, last year, nearly 120,000 contestants.

It also champions literacy programs throughout the year and has stocked libraries in low-income areas. Bad NaNos.

The purpose of NaNoWriMo seems laudable enough. Above all, it fosters the habit of writing every single day, the closest thing to a universally prescribed strategy for eventually producing a book. NaNoWriMo spurs aspiring authors to conquer their inner critics and blow past blocks. Only by producing really, really bad first drafts can many writers move on to the practice that results in decent work: revision... "Make no mistake," the organization's website counsels. "You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create."

All true. No arguments here.

I am not the first person to point out that "writing a lot of crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

Why not? Is it less fruitful than watching reruns of Law and Order? Playing World of Warcraft? Making model train terrain or jewelry from polymer clay? All fine pursuits, but are they more fruitful than writing a novel? A number of published writers I know use NaNo to churn out messy first drafts, which they then revise and submit for publication. Others use NaNo to explore new genres, or just to rediscover the joy of writing.

And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they'll shortly receive.

True. But since these writers are going directly against the advice posted by NaNo founders and participants, this is hardly a reflection of the event itself. Does Miller know the percentage of WriMos who submit their first drafts? Judging from the forum posts and from the participants I know, these "premature submitters" are the exception rather than the rule. (I once read a very funny blog post by a writer who said he hoped every single NaNo participant would submit his or her first draft in December, because his carefully polished, professional manuscript would look doubly good by comparison.)

Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it?

Who is insisting that anybody read it? Are there hordes of enthusiastic WriMos forcing Miller's eyelids open with toothpicks and holding their unedited manuscript pages in front of her face?

Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.)

As have many other WriMos, some of whom are published and some of whom never will be. But this comment is still missing the point. NaNo is not about creating publishable books that Laura Miller--or anyone else, for that matter--wants to read. It's about celebrating the written word, discovering that writing is fun, meeting a personal goal. For some, it's about writing a draft that may later, after much revision, be published. For some, it's about having fun with words. (Stuck? Throw in some flying monkeys! That's not how I write, but I'm not writing just for fun.) There are thousands of reasons for doing NaNo, and not all of them involve publication. [Insert personal reason here.]

The last thing the world needs is more bad books.

I think the last thing the world needs is more cancer, but hey, that's just me.

But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.
Here's why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary.

Are writer's conferences, books on writing, workshops and classes on the writing craft also unnessary? How about those beautiful leather journals? Okay, maybe so, but the world is full of unnessary things we love and enjoy. Stained glass, golf clubs, and salt-water aquariums, just to name a few. I would argue that footballs and hockey stadiums are also largely unnecessary, but a lot of people take pleasure from them.

When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. "Write Your Novel Here" was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event.

Why? Were they putting a moratorium on book sales and reading-related events for the month of November?

It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

This is the part that completely baffled me. First, why would anybody assume that reading and writing were mutually exclusive? Or that "cultural spaces" devoted to one come at the expense of the other? Second, what makes reading "a selfless art" and writing "a narcissistic commerce?" You mean all those years I spend reading The Call of the Wild as a child were not pleasure but social service? Cool! But, wait. When I read A Christmas Carol, I'm not thinking, "Oh my gosh, that Dickens, what a narcissistic jerk!"

Of course, Miller admits that only a handful of novelists meet her elite standards, so maybe she does think that way, but as a reader (and yes, Virginia, writers do read), I'm grateful to every author who has written a book I've enjoyed. I'm especially grateful to those whose writing changed my life. It seemed an act of incredible generosity for J.R.R. Tolkien to share Middle Earth with me, or for Louisa May Alcott to share the lives of the March sisters.

I say "commerce" because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them.

Um...I suspect James Patterson, Steven King, and Dan Brown bring in more money than all the "craft of writing" books put together.

And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. "People would come up to me at parties," author Ann Bauer recently told me, "and say, 'I've been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this ...' And I'd (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read ... Now, the 'What do you read?' question is inevitably answered, 'Oh, I don't have time to read. I'm just concentrating on my writing.'"

I met one of those once. I suppose one is an astonishing number. I've also met hundreds of writers--even NaNoWriMo writers--who are avid readers. I would suggest that even author Ann Bauer knows more writers who read than who don't, and if she doesn't, she should probably find a new bunch of writers to hang out with.

Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there -- more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it's our job to do so.

Also enough paintings. Also enough papier mache dinosaurs. That doesn't mean people should stop making them. Just because there are already more novels than I can read in my lifetime doesn't mean the next one being written won't be worth reading.

This is not to say that I don't hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement. Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it.

Only two dozen novelists whose work Miller deems worthy of being written, let alone being read. That speaks for itself.

But I'm confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.

Would Water for Elephants have been written without NaNoWriMo? Maybe so--or maybe not. But is that really the point? The world wouldn't end if NaNoWriMo vanished from the earth. It also wouldn't end if chocolate ice cream vanished from the earth, or if novels in general vanished from the earth. That doesn't mean any of the above would be a good thing.

Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant -- publication by a major house -- will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

That may be true. Even though some studies suggest that reading is on the increase, odds are, any one title will sell poorly. If there were no NaNoWriMo, would that magically change?

So I'm not worried about all the books that won't get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on.

Going out of one's way to make fun of them seems to demonstrate a serious lack of generosity, though.

Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say.

And why not? There are plenty of people who paint on the weekends and have no desire to make a living at it. Writing is more than a hobby to me, but that doesn't mean it can't be a hobby for others. Is this an appropriate place to point out that Miller herself makes her living writing, albeit criticism, not novels?

Writers have a reputation for being tormented by their lot, probably because they're always moaning so loudly about how hard it is, but it's the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species.

I'm not sure I even understand what is meant by, "readers are fragile." I'm a reader. I read a lot and would read even more if I had time. Reading isn't hard. It's delightful and fun and informative and number of good things. I don't need to praised for it; it's its own reward.

They don't make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.

There are reasons upon reasons for why people don't read. Poor education, reading not supported or valued in the home, poverty, an increasing number of other, highly stimulating things to do, like video games, social networking, YouTube, and DVDs. Are there really readers "fading away" for lack of appreciation? I don't think so. As noted above, reading is its own reward.

Rather than squandering our applause on writers...why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers?

Must it be either/or?

Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug's "10/10/10" challenge: These two women read 10 book in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites.

The 10/10/10 challenge sounds like great fun. Someone on another blog suggested a NaNoReaMo event, where the goal is to read a massive number of books in a month (not November, of course. Another month). Great ideas! Can I do NaNoWriMo and NaNoReaMo? Because, as most of us know, writers read.

I just came across another blog refuting the Miller post. Check here for Carolyn Kellogg's cogent, point-by-point argument to Miller's post.

My friend David Allison had a great heart and a great love for life. He was member of a "hashing" group whose tongue-in-cheek description of themselves is "a drinking group with a running problem." When the trail gets rough, they encourage themselves to continue by saying, "On, on!" As far as I know, it's the rallying cry for hashers everywhere.

I know he would approve if I shared it with you now: "On, On, WriMos! On, On!"

On Being a Pro-Crastinator

By Chester Campbell

My wife calls me a procrastinator. I say, heck, it's good to be a "pro" at something. But I suppose she's right in one respect. I should be writing on my current WIP (Work in Progress, for the uninitiated), but here I sit chatting up the blogosphere.

My Murderous Musings colleague Beth Terrell is getting ready to take part in NaNoWriMo, pounding out 50,000 words during the month of November. If I could mirror that feat with my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery, I'd be in high cotton, as they say in these parts. Since I'm currently at the 18,423-word mark, that would take me almost to 70,000 words. My books don't usually run much longer than that.

NaNoWriMo, as you may or may not know, is National Novel Writing Month, when authors around the globe are challenged to turn out 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. The object is to take an idea and plug away at it, just to get all the words on paper, or in the computer. There's no time for editing. Just keep the pot (or plot) boiling. After all is done, you can go back and clean it up, patching the holes and prettying up the language.

As a procrastinator, I can't work like that. Each time I sit down, I have to go back over what I wrote last time out and make it sound better. Chances are I've had a new thought that requires me to go back and add something I neglected to do earlier. Like the other day I thought of a question the detective should have asked, so I backtracked to the proper spot in the story and beefed up the dialogue. Keeps readers from thinking why didn't the idiot pursue such-and-such?

My daily, when I can arrange it, walk at the mall provides a fertile time for thinking about the plot and searching out those holes that need to be filled. Sometimes I come up with ideas on new twists to put more strain on my poor protagonists. I'm a remorseless taskmaster. They don't get time to procrastinate.

But me? I have an excuse. I spent the past five days, including travel, atternding Bouchercon 2009, pushing my published work and trying to convince the good folks who read mysteries that I'm working on more to come. And I am. As soon as I finish this little tome, I'm heading for the living room and my laptop to plunge headlong into Chapter 13. Hmm, that's an ominous note. But what's even more ominous is that it will probably be nearly ten o'clock. That means local news, followed by a DVD recording of the early evening national news. Than it'll be bedtime. We have to arise at 6:15 to get grandson ready for school.

Okay, no more procrastination. As soon as he's off to school, I'm battening down the hatches (good old naval cliche) and battling away at the laptop. That's a promise. Unless something unforseen comes  up, of course.

Loving Your Inner Editor

By Beth Terrell

November is approaching, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). More than 100,000 people from all over the world will write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel between 12:01 A.M. November 1 and midnight of November 30. The writers range from teenagers to octogenarians. Some are professional authors who will later edit their NaNo novels into something worth publishing. (Sara Gruen's award-winning novel Water for Elephants began as a NaNo novel.) Some will populate their stories with time-traveling ninjas, flying monkeys, and random song lyrics. It's a month-long writing exercise and a month-long celebration of creativity. It's a little bit crazy. And it's a heck of a lot of fun.

Soon the "I Hate NaNoWriMo" blog posts will begin to spring up like mushrooms across the internet. These are generally written by aspiring or little-known authors who believe the flood of dreadful NaNo manuscripts will somehow keep their masterpieces from being published. Successful writers rarely feel this way; Sue Grafton and Neil Gaiman are two of the many well-known authors who provide the pep talks that go out to participants each week of the event.

The NaNoWiMo forums mention muses a lot. How to attract your muse, how to keep your muse happy and busy, the care and feeding of a muse. NaNo is all about the muse, which is as it should be. The exercise is about messy first drafts, raw and unpolished but fresh and genuine. That first draft is to a writer what a block of clay is to a sculptor. You can't make art without it. Yay, Muse!

There was one thread, though, that gave me pause. It was about all the ways in which people might keep their metaphorical inner editors away during November. All I can say is, there's a lot of resentment toward inner editors out there. Most of the suggestions involved stuffing Inner Editor (generally bound with ropes or chains) into a closet or trunk, locking the door or lid, and hiding the key until December 1.

I fully understand the need to keep Inner Editor from interfering during the first draft process, but all this talk of binding and stuffing makes me (and MY inner editor) a little uncomfortable. After all, Inner Editor has valuable skills we're going to need when it's time to make something beautiful from that big lump of first-draft clay. Maybe, instead of gagging her and handcuffing her to a radiator, we could take a different approach.

When Creative Self and I are working on an early draft, Inner Editor leans over our shoulder and mutters, "You call that writing? Hemingway would turn over in his grave," I remind her that her turn will come--Creative Self is busy making a beautiful, flawed first draft for Inner Editor to carve and polish into a thing of beauty. She gets starry-eyed at the prospect, and I give her chocolate and send her away to bask on a beach somewhere until Creative Self proudly calls her back and plops a finished draft into her hands.

Inner Editor can be critical and sarcastic, but when treated gently and reminded that constructive criticism can still be kind, she's a team player. Assured that her turn will come, she's content to let Creative Self play, with only an occasional nudge ("Hey, you just wrote paedcpm. Didn't you mean peacock?"). As she works her magic, she's happy to let Creative Self watch and weave in a little magic of her own. The editing process becomes a dance between the analytical ("This back story is interesting, but does it really move the story?") and the creative ("Wait, I have a better idea!").

In our celebration of the Muse, let's not forget a kind word for the oft-maligned Inner Editor. Come December, we're going to need her.

Why Write?

By Beth Terrell

A few years ago, I went to a small conference in North Carolina. In the drawing room of a lovely old hotel, several authors spoke about the process and business of writing. I talked about editing and the multiple drafts it takes to get a book to the polished level professional authors strive to achieve. (Granted, a privileged few get it perfect the first time, every time, but they are mutant geniuses who must be destroyed...um...of course, I mean "honored.")

Anyway, I spoke about editing and gave out a handout with a number of steps toward, one hopes, scintillating writing. Then another talked about the process of finding an agent or publisher and getting your book accepted. Still another spoke on marketing and what it takes to make a living as a novelist.

One woman in the audience finally raised her hand, and said in a voice of quiet desperation, "But what if I don't want to do all that? What if I just want to write?"

At another conference, a would-be novelist said to me, "Our critique leader said I needed to read a lot if I want to write. But I hate to read. Do you think she's right?" Over the years, I've heard multiple variations on this theme. I love to write, but it seems so hard. Do I really have to do all this?

My answer is always, "It depends on what you want from your writing."

Yes, if you want to be successfully published, you have to read, you have to write, you have to edit and polish and edit again. You have to pursue a writing contract (or publish your book on your own), and once the book is out there, you have to market the heck out of it. It's a lot of work, and if you want to be the next Dennis Lehane or Janet Evanovitch, you have to make a real commitment to do it. Jim Rollins was accepted by the fiftieth agent he submitted to. J.K. Rowling submitted the first Harry Potter novel over 100 times. If your goal is to be a professional writer, you must do what it takes to make your work as good as it can be, and then never give up.

But if what you want is to put ideas down on paper for your own enjoyment, for catharsis, or so your children and grandchildren will someday read your words and know who you are, then all you have to do is put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and let fly. Writing is fun, and it's for everybody. There's no sign on the door that says "AMATEURS KEEP OUT."

That word, amateur, is sometimes used in a pejorative way, but it is not a pejorative term. My dictionary defines "amateur" as "a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons." That sounds like a great reason for writing--or doing any other form of art, for that matter. Oil painting, for example. I suspect there are millions of amateur painters out there, some of whom paint well, some of whom paint poorly, some of whom create exquisite works of art, but all of whom paint only for themselves or a few friends. No one thinks they should give up painting just because their work will never hang in a museum. The process of painting brings them joy, and that's enough.

But with writing, for some reason, there's a sense that, if you aren't writing for publication, you might as well hang up your laptop. Want proof? Every year, thousands of people join in a joyful frenzy of writing called NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month), in which the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. And every year, like clockwork, the "I-Hate-NaNoWriMo" blogs spring up like mushrooms. "These people have no business writing," they say. And, "The flood of horrible books makes it harder for us real writers to get published."

You never read rants by fine artists about how the millions of people for whom painting is a hobby are screwing it up for the real artists. So why do some writers think putting words on a page is the sole purview of the professionals?

There are a million reasons to write: creating characters that come to life on the page, building a world that once only existed in your mind, setting down a history of family stories that will otherwise be lost, getting an email that says, "I was reading snatches of your book at stoplights; I couldn't put it down." Of course, we mustn't forget the accolades and the six million dollar movie deal.

Me, I want the whole shebang--to be a full-time, published author, making a living doing the thing I love the most. The woman in my North Carolina audience wanted something different, and that's okay too.

That's the great thing about writing. Amateur or professional, we are richer for having done it.