Monday 24 November 2008

Evan's piece on NaNoWriMo earlier this month has been fortuitously followed by a related bit of news in The Bookseller, where independent bookshops have been bemoaning the lack of new and challenging fiction, with one bookseller actually struggling to "put together a good table that doesn't look like W H Smith's."

Wherefore great new hitherto-unknown literary fiction? Should publishers be looking at the authors registered on NaNoWrimo for their next breakthrough novel? With only six days to go before the month closes down and an approximate 118,000 aspiring authors on the list, that would be the job of a veritable building-full of editorial assistants willing to go through all available synopses and sample chapters to try and find The One.

I would hazard a guess that this is more than slightly impractical - wholly insurmountable, even.

Given NaNoWriMo's goal of producing 50,000 words in 30 days, "valuing enthusiasm and perserverance over painstaking craft", it's an acknowledged fact that most participants will be writing stuff that's really, really unmentionably poor. Some might say that is a complete waste of time - why commit so much to paper or hard drive when there is no intention of getting published? But bad writing has its place in the world, too. Stuart Evers writes in the Guardian Books Blog the value terrible fiction holds - "Reading such defunct narratives isn't therefore a waste of time, but a building up of experience."

It may be a fate worse than death for most of us to willingly plough through a bad book, but the 'best' of the bad can make us appreciate excellent writing so much more. However, I'm not sure I would see things quite as charitably as Evers!

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