NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month, a fact which amused me muchly given my Pavlovian response to seeing NaNo. Since this does relate to writing, one of my other passions, I’m including this excerpt from Sharleen Johnson’s Nov. 3, 2010 blog posting,

The Internet is abuzz with reaction to critic Laura Miller’s Salon piece on NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month, a literary contest requiring participants to start and complete a novel of 50,000 words or more during the month of November. If you meet that goal, you’re a “winner”—and Miller decries that there were 21,683 such winners last year: “The last thing the world needs is more bad books.”

NaNoWriMo assures its participants that most of what they write will be crap.

Miller says, “I am not the first person to point out that ‘writing a lot of crap’ doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.”

Writing crap is not a worthless pastime. In one of my favorite books about writing, Anne Lamott says “shitty first drafts” are just fine. If you don’t allow yourself freedom to write badly, you’ll never get anything much down on screen or paper. Writing lots of shitty crap is how one starts.

Precisely, Ms. Johnson.