I spent a few extremely fun days in Pittsburgh last week, doing a couple of readings, getting to know some very interesting people, and even making a trip over to the Monroeville mall, where George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was filmed. At one of my readings, I met a fellow writer who puts out an email newsletter on writing topics. I signed up for the newsletter and was impressed with some of the practical tips she gave, so I thought I’d give the newsletter a plug here. It’s called Brite Lites Writer Gazette, and if you want to check it out, you can email SandraGouldFord at aol dot com.

The current issue of Brite Lites is all about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, which, in case you’re unfamiliar, occurs every November when people all over the country attempt to write a first draft of a novel—minimum 50,000 words—in a month. The newsletter got me thinking about why I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo, and probably never will.

First of all, I should say that NaNoWriMo is a great motivational tool. At its heart, NaNoWriMo is simply a goal to work towards, a concrete deadline to get people writing. By encouraging people across the country to set the same goal, NaNoWriMo effectively creates a sense of community for these writers, encouraging them to stick with it and holding them accountable if they don’t.

You know me—I’m all for goal setting. Without goals, I would never have produced enough work to publish a book, and I wouldn’t, probably, write anywhere near enough to legitimately call myself a writer. So why, then, do I have zero interest in trying NaNoWriMo for myself?

Well, while I see NaNoWriMo as an extremely valuable tool for new writers, the more seasoned you get, the less useful this kind of extreme goal becomes. I think part of the point in NaNoWriMo is to make people who don’t write very much, but who have always wanted to write a book, realize that they can do it. They can pump out a full-length novel if they just try. This isn’t particularly useful to more seasoned writers, who have written plenty of books before, or who have published fairly extensively. These people already know what they’re capable of, and they probably know how much they need to write and what sort of routine they need to keep in order to complete a particular project.

But more than that, the main reason I’m not interested in NaNoWriMo myself is because I feel it’s too stringent of a goal. That’s actually kind of the idea, right? Writing 100% new material for three or four hours a day, every day, isn’t something that even professional writers usually do. Most writers allow room for days when you spend three hours agonizing over a single paragraph, or when you realize something is not quite right about a previous chapter and you want to go back and revise it. The idea behind setting such a strict goal is to push yourself about as hard as it’s possible to push, like running a marathon or climbing Mount Everest.

The problems with pushing yourself that hard, in my opinion, are countless. First of all, just like when you push yourself to the brink physically, you’re likely to collapse at the end of it all. You’re likely to want, maybe desperately need, a break when you’re done, which makes the experience more like a crash diet than a lifestyle change.

On top of that, NaNoWriMo emphasizes writing a first draft, which I think de-emphasizes a FAR more important part of the writing process: revising. Savvy writers would have the sense to see that whatever they pump out in that frenzied month is likely to be absolute crap and that they need to revise it extensively if they want it to be any good, but a lot of amateur writers probably don’t understand that—they think of revising as proofreading and little more—and even those writers who do recognize the value of revision are going to have more work ahead of them when they get back to work on their sloppily thrown together manuscripts than if they had taken more time during the initial drafting stage.

Plus, it’s widely recognized that goal setting is most effective when you set reasonable goals that are within your power to accomplish. Like many writers, I have a job and a family. If I were to push myself to write roughly 1,667 words a day for a month—about how many words you’d have to write to pump out 50,000 in thirty days—what would most likely happen would be that I would be unable, through no fault of my own, to meet the goal. This would leave me, at the end of the month, feeling like a failure, stressed and discouraged, unsure of my own abilities as a writer. I would, in other words, be worse off for having tried. I’d be better off, instead, looking at my own life, my own specific situation and commitments, and setting a goal for myself that pushes me just hard enough but is still absolutely reachable if I just work at it. Now that, my friends, is a goal that will likely benefit me.