Heheh... that's the point of Nanowrimo! It's totally OK to suck. The goal is to write 50,000 words, not 50,000 GOOD words. You aren't even supposed to know they suck until December 1st, since you shouldn't be going back, rereading and revising, but just keep plowing ahead.

The somewhat unspoken trick here is that once you give yourself permission to suck -- once you turn off that crippling critic in your head -- then your creative side can get going. Sometimes you have to write a few pages before it really believes it's safe to come out of its shell, but eventually it will. Tell it it's OK, nobody is watching. You may be surprised by what beautiful things it comes up with.

My theory is that there are two things that go into making a good writer.

The first is that they have learned how to at least temporarily turn off the inner critic and to coax their creative side out to play. (For some reason I am imaging something like a pile of Snausages outside its den. But whatever works for you.)

The second is that everyone who writes well paid her dues at some point: by writing many, many thousands of words of complete and utter crap, gradually improving to the point of being "good". I have never heard of anyone just sitting down one day and writing a masterpiece on their first try. Even the most amazing authors, all their lives, write first drafts that are stuffed full of crap. You HAVE to write the crap. There is no way around it. If you're just waiting until some magical ripening process inside of you comes to completion, whereupon you will finally be able to put fingers to keyboard and start writing Really Good Stuff, you are fooling yourself.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS. This is the proof you're not wasting your time, even if your Nanowrimo novel is (say it with me) complete and utter crap. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is almost a guarantee of crap. That's the purpose. Nanowrimo takes care of points one and two, henceforth to be summarized thusly:

1. Shut up the inner critic and write like nobody's watching, and
2. Write as much crap as you can.

And I don't recommend dwelling too much on prior crap, unless it's so far behind you that you can be proud of how far you've come. (My grudging reaction to the first few years of Lothere, for instance.) Think about it: would you rather read your work from the future? Yes, it would be heartening to see how well you will write someday, but at the same time it would be awful to sit down and start writing at your today-level, and be extra-depressed at how much you suck now. THAT would be crippling. Instead, when looking at your old stuff, you should say "What a relief! I will never write this badly again!" Because every time you write, you learn.

So shove the old stuff underneath the pile of non-writing-related crap in your bottom dresser drawer, and go forth, confident that you will suck a little less every time!

This message was brought to you by the number Crap and the letter Suck.

Thanks Lothere. That really cheered me up. I thought about it and, well, there's really no way I can't NOT suck, I guess, so why not. Even if 99.99% of my writing is complete and utter wordpuke, then at least I can still say I tried and at least, AT LEAST, I did write that 0.01% that was actually good. I agree with Tiffany that I would so buy a book of these pieces of good advice.

I forsee it.

And I want a cut off the top for proposing the whole thing.

Sounds good to me.