I’m participating in Nanowrimo right now. For those not already in the know, National Novel Writing Month is a contest spanning November, where participants try to write a 50,000 word story in 30 days. That amounts to about 1,700 words a day. It’s doable, but requires you to really grind away at producing, and to make some changes to how you normally create.
Most notably, you have to embrace low standards. You have to be willing to forgo editing, commit to whatever you start writing, and just create. In order to churn out 50,000 words in a month, you need to write with low standards. A lot of advice for Nanowrimo flies in the face of what’s commonly accepted as “good writing”: don’t plan; don’t edit; if you run a storyline dry, just switch storylines but keep the word count; put your characters through hell in order to wrack up a suitable word count.
At first, it’s quite stressful. You’re being asked to keep writing, even when you’re unsatisfied with your work. Eventually, though, you realize “holy shit, I’m at 15,000 words now”. And you feel proud, regardless of the utter bile contained in those words. A joy arises, from the permission you’ve given yourself.
Nanowrimo challenges you to validate yourself and your work without qualification. If you banked 4,000 words in a single day, then you’re doing an amazing job, full stop. Every word is the perfect word, so long as you leave it and keep moving on.
This contest isn’t exactly unique in promoting sheer, unconditional creation: One Song Every Day, Thing-A-Day, Album-A-Day, Crap Art, Three Day Novel, 24-Hour RPG.
What’s brilliant about these projects? They promote us to produce, to create, to ignore that inner critic and to validate our own efforts without qualification. And its that last part that’s really vital, because we so rarely allow ourselves to acknowledge something as perfect and finished and good. Which is bizarre, because we get such joy out of those rare moments when we do acknowledge something as perfect and finished and good.
Lowering standards (especially removing standards entirely) allows us to accept ourselves without qualification.
Doing that brings us joy. It also trains us to overcome our creative paralysis.
That creative paralysis that comes with high standards… we can learn to avoid it, by creating without those high standards. And if we so choose to return to those standards again, we’ll be better equipped to deal with them, because we’ll know more about our capabilities and our limits. Playing in a safe space equips us with new skills that we can take with us, even outside of the safe space.
Story games work like that, in a way. We can explore courses of action that we are paralyzed from committing in the real world, whether from fear or uncertainty or strict norms. And we can play them out in this shared imagined space, and learn about capabilities, limits, consequences and the impacts of those actions. And that enables us to better understand those actions, and even to carry them out, in the real world.
Sometimes, though, we find ourselves returning to those standards that have become so intrinsic to us. In a story game, this is about blocking and rejecting on the basis of quality or realism or some sense of need. What need is there, and on what level is it truly operating? Can a story or character take a “gift” from left field and incorporate it, play with it, and in doing so give us that joy of creating without qualifiation? I think it can. So, what other benefit are those standards giving, when we bring them into our creative endeavors? And what other harm are they creating, at the same time?
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