LUV & HAT

LUV - They say that everyone has a novel in them. You. Me. That man in the KEEP CALM AND HAVE A BEER t-shirt. Jedward. Everyone. And given the rich tapestry of human experience, you’d expect each novel to be a literary snowflake: a unique snapshot of the world; multilayered, vibrant and delightfully awry (or in Jedward’s case, one novel full of lobotomised adrenaline and a second, slightly less enthusiastic and published two minutes later).

But no. If you’re to believe the NaNoWriMo forums, the novel that everyone has in them is called MOONSOUL DRAGONLUST, and it’s about a slightly overweight Joss Whedon fanatic who discovers, while updating her crocheting LiveJournal, that she’s actually descended from a line of centaur/mermaid hybrids and must travel to her home dimension of KPLARGH to be imbued with “magics” so she can bone an elf, defeat an army of werewolves and learn something about herself.

Yes, everyonehas this novel in them. MOONSOUL DRAGONLUST is the sound your heart would make if it could sing. But what are you going to do about it? I mean, it’s November. It’s cold, the nights are drawing in, and your daily caffeine-to-water ratio is completely off. All you want to do this month is hide under a duvet and gorge on cheese.

Which makes the warriors of NaNoWriMo all the more courageous. 

These people are bravely eschewing duvets, cheese and adequate sleep to sweat out 50,000 words of fiction by midnight on 30th November. Admittedly most of those words are “immortal”, “leather” and “portal”, but they’re doing it. They’re putting two fingers up at perfectionism, quality and taste, and committing to getting something done.

Because it’s hard to create things. Whatever sparks of creativity we have pinging around our skulls are deadened by everyday drudgery and crushed before we even notice them by the perfect, polished efforts of our betters. But NaNoWriMo teaches two things: 

1) Everyone, no matter how big or established, turns in a shitty first draft - perfection is in the editorial process.

2) If you build it, they will come - start typing whatever for long enough and at some point a decent idea will come strolling across the page.

And once you discover this for yourself, it’s incredibly freeing. You should try it. Wouldn’t you like to hear the song your heart longs to sing? What’s the risk - a little lack of sleep, a little RSI? And it’s not like anyone’s going to read it.

Which is lucky, really. Because the song your heart longs to sing is awful. I mean, it’s terrible. You’re basically the Vengaboys.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Oh, you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year, are you? Thank you. I mean that. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You looked inside your soul and you realised that what the world needs more than anything else is a long, dull, badly-structured book about a magic hat or a singing fucking twig or a cupcake that’s got nipples which only really serves as an allegory for the way that sometimes your last boyfriend couldn’t, like, see your full potential and stuff. How did you KNOW? You’re a treasure. No, really.

You’ve got pluck. I applaud that. Wanking out 50,000 dreary words over the space of a single month takes a lot of effort. Most people wouldn’t even bother. But not you. No, you can see the bigger picture. You know that, once you’ve finished, you can spend the rest of your life crowing ambiguously about the book you wrote while desperately trying to deflect attention from the fact that a) it was never actually published so b) it’s less of a book and more a collection of shit words thrown together exclusively to slow your hard drive down a bit. And good on you for that.

You could have picked anything to do with your month. You could have climbed a mountain or run a marathon or volunteered for charity or spent time repairing the frayed bonds with those closest to you. But you didn’t. You chose to spend it in a room, clacking away interminably on a piece of electronic equipment, because you mistakenly think that your awful meaningless job in online marketing is the only thing stopping you from truly expressing a creative talent in the mould of the great poets. And that says a lot about you. You should pat yourself on the back. When you’ve stopped trying to give yourself a blowjob, that is.

People like you make the world a better place. They told the Wright brothers that man would never fly. They told Neil Armstrong that man would never set foot on the moon. And did they listen? No they didn’t. Just like how you didn’t listen when they told you that genuinely the last thing that anyone needs in their lives is another terrible book that adds absolutely nothing to the sum total of anything except your misplaced self-infatuation. They were right, by the way, but you didn’t listen to them and that’s what’s important

So hooray for you, young NaNoWriMo writer. You keep on being you. And, who knows, you might end up writing the next Water For Elephants. Which was fucking dreadful but, you know, whatever my point was supposed to be.
- Stuart Heritage