Nasty NaNo
I feel like I saw a lot of nastiness towards NaNo last year that I had never seen before. What’s with that, humans? Is a community of people helping each other write somehow threatening to you? Cos if it is, wtf?
I’d never seen it before so I’m baffled if it has always existed or if people just need something to latch onto & hate. The worst I’ve seen before is “ugh how good can the writing even be?” … the point is a draft… drafts often suck. But you can edit & improve on something you’ve written, you can’t on something that hasn’t been written yet.
I feel like (again, this might be reflective of my feeds and loud people vs a genuine movement of nastiness towards it) that it’s coming from people who have been professional writers for so long that they don’t understand, remember, or maybe empathise with what it is like to be new to writing something massive, especially doing it for the first time.
I have the advantage of having been to university, with two essay-laden degrees. This means I have more writing practice going into NaNoWriMo than a complete newbie to writing, someone with the “yeah I want to do this one day” and not much else level of beginner. That doesn’t mean that the support of the community shouldn’t be there for those who need it to complete what is a large and challenging task.
