NaNoWriMo--not hurting "real" literature

It being the first of November, it would be not only a huge travesty to you, the reader-writer, but an insult to my past four Novembers, my participating online friends, and those who I colloquially call the "Vegas WriMos" to not mention the fact that National Novel Writing Month has begun and is in full swing in a coffee shop near you. To participate, you sign up at the website, pick a novel-sized story you haven't started yet, and begin writing today with the goal of writing 50,000 words by midnight, November 30th. The goal is to not obsess about quality, but instead about reaching the number 50,000.

I have participated every year since 2003, losing only once (I didn't like the genre of story and I met the love of my life), and only meeting up with local participants last year. Every year has been an amazing experience for me, and I always look forward to it. This year, however, I am not participating for a variety of reasons, so instead I wondered: "It's a bad idea for me to do NaNoWriMo this year; is it for anyone else?"

What Google quickly informed me was that not only was it not a bad idea to take a year off, but also that, out there in the world, there are people that think that NaNoWriMo is an affront to their livelihood or drowns their babies or kicks their puppies or something like that. Whatever it is that Chris Baty and the crew at the Office of Letters and Light did, it must have been pretty bad to warrant this kind of opposition. Alma Hromic (Don't worry; I have no idea who she is either.) wrote an article by the name of NaNoWriMo: Now You Too Can Be A Writer! back in 2002, which basically accuses the masterminds behind NaNoWriMo of kicking her and her profession in the shin for coming up with such a program. Don't take my word for it; read the article. If you took the time to investigate the NaNoWriMo website beforehand, you may be scratching your head. Mocking real novelists? Hurting future authors' chances at publication? Participating is like performing brain surgery without training, or playing in traffic?

Forgive me if you agree with her, but I find her arguments to be unresearched (she clearly only delved as far as she "needed" to form an "educated" opinion without looking for evidence to the contrary), her arrogance to be overwhelming, and her comparisons to be unfounded and exaggerated. If someone wants to write a silly story about penguin serial killers and pirate emus in the comfort of their own home in order to practice writing for fun and not worrying about the quality of their work, it's hardly going to hurt "real" literature. If someone wants to use NaNoWriMo as a reason to stop procrastinating and write that story they've always wanted to write, a new author isn't going to be rejected by a publishing house because it might be one of "those" novels.

What NaNoWriMo does is make writing fun for those that would otherwise never get around to it for fear of their own inadequacy. It's people like Hromic on their high-horses that make writers like these paranoid that they won't be able to measure up. Writing is not something restricted only to the published, career authors. It can be for the casual writer to. It's not black and white.

And for God's sakes, writing badly is hardly going to kill anyone or make their house fall down. Stop saying that it will.