I’ve seen people say they don’t want to read a book that came out of NaNoWriMo.
If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Participants are challenged to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in a single month. You can technically start any time, but every November 1st, NaNoWriMo takes over social media as thousands of writers announce their goal to complete a novel in 30 days that day.
For some reason, many people assume that books written under this challenge must be badly written. I once stumbled across a Medium article (before they banned me) titled: “Thanks, but if your book was written in 30 days, I’m not interested.”
Sure, with so many people participating, there will inevitably be a lot of rough drafts—and some of those even get published. Perhaps the author of the Medium post encountered some poorly written stories and then generalized from there.
But just because a book is written quickly doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Think about the opposite: does a book automatically become good if it takes a year to write it? Or is a novel written over a decade necessarily superior to one completed in two years? The answer is obviously: no.
Consider some famous examples:
- Stephen King wrote The Running Man in just two months.
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson was written in two months too.
- Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was completed in roughly 8 weeks.
- Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was written in a month.
- H.P. Lovecraft often wrote stories within weeks, sometimes days.
- Stevenson reportedly wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in only three days.
It’s not limited to literature. The script for Rocky took Sylvester Stallone four days. Sam Raimi wrote The Evil Dead in three weeks. Even a complex drama like Good Will Hunting was written in just seven weeks.
Music follows the same pattern: Ozzy Osbourne claimed that Paranoid, one of Black Sabbath’s biggest hits, was written in ten minutes—music and lyrics. Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday in a dream and merely jotted it down upon waking. Smoke on the Water was improvised in front of journalists who wanted to see Deep Purple write a song live.
The bottom line: when creativity strikes, time doesn’t matter. You can write a masterpiece in days, or toil for a lifetime and produce something forgettable.
If you’ve got an idea, sit down and write. And if you can’t stop writing, chances are you’re creating something so engaging that readers will struggle to put the finished book down.
Of course, editing and professional proofreading matter. But don’t assume that a book automatically becomes better simply because you spent more time on it. What truly matters is the idea and your talent for shaping it into a piece of art. And if you have both, you might write a hit song in your sleep, a timeless classic-novel in days, or an Oscar-winning script in weeks.
