I came across a blog post that purports that Nanowrimo is fundamentally flawed. In that author's viewpoint, this opinion is valid--but I would not generalize this to everyone. Certainly, Chris Baty's rhetoric and the hodge-podge of the forums strongly lend a particular impression, but this is merely how the most vocal view this challenge. Everyone seems hung up on the notion of "quantity over quality". It's just a motto to take the pressure off, to make things less daunting. Because, in truth, is anyone really going to throw you off a bridge if you produce quality rather than quantity?
There are as many ways to write as there are writers. Just because Person A cannot write by the seat of his pants does not mean that Person B has the same peccadillo. While it is okay to find that ultimately Nanowrimo is anathema to your own writing methods, it is not all right to force everyone else away from it. (The converse is also true. I find it equally detestable that some might want to force the unwilling to participate in Nanowrimo. Proselytizers of any sort tend to be more unreasonable than not.) Writing is a personal and artistic endeavor where there is no such thing as right or wrong.
I've been participating in Nanowrimo for a fair number of years. And admittedly, my personal interpretation of the rules is extremely old school compared to, say, even some people who've started participating five years ago*. But this is just my interpretation. I view the Nanowrimo challenge similarly to a book: when your work is released out into the world, the author ceases to be in sole possession of it--the reader's interpretation is just as valid as the author's. Thus, the Nanowrimo challenge is what the participants make of it. Some might be in it to get those 50,000 words, regardless of whether those words are crap or diamonds. Others might just need it to kick start their other projects. And yet others only want to feed on the creative enthusiasm that gets generated each year in the forums. There's still this quantifiable metric of meeting a 50,000 word goal that is imposed so that the event itself does not lose meaning--but how you get there (aside from doing everything in a month) is not specified.
Undoubtedly, there are silly posts on the forums. Especially during November, there will be many participants moaning about the "crap" they're writing or scrambling for desperate and ridiculous ways to up their word count. This happens every year. Does this mean that Nanowrimo is crappy and ridiculous? No. It just means that these are the ways some participants cope with Nanowrimo. I say: worry less about how other people are doing and more about how you are writing. If Nanowrimo turns out to be a great experience for you, good! If it turns out to be the worst way you could go about writing anything, that's cool, too. You can at least call it a learning experience. And if you still insist that high velocity writing is akin to torture, I'd say that there are a lot worse things in this world than scribbling away for thirty days.
*This will be my ninth year participating in Nanowrimo. I'd like to think that I'm past the cranky old-timer stage, but sometimes, I still roll my eyes as the same things are said, over and over again.
