It’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrMo) – when a bunch of writing enthusiasts try to churn out unedited novels of 50,000 words each during the course of 30 days. Preferably appallingly rushed novels. Preferably in blissful unconcern for any kind of quality or meaning. Despite not particularly wanting to write a novel at this point, I find the project strangely appealing. The phrase that most comes to mind for the kinds of novels this project is set on promoting is “penny dreadfuls;” so named because they used to sell in England for a penny. There’s something to be said for that. Rousseau is nostalgic for a time when people sung their stories as poetry; I suppose this is more evidence for English being a language more given to writing than speech – I know plenty of people who might aspire to write a novel, and nobody at all who aspires to sing bardic epics in the plaza. Things like The Canterbury Tales are both odd and difficult to us because they’re meant to be read aloud; not something much encouraged. So we write mounds of prose stories – novels – with as much gusto as the Miller lent to his tale, but a good deal less rhythm and rhyme; things meant to please the ear. It seems likely that if we moderns were to have a contest a la Canterbury Tales it would be conducted like a writing workshop: everyone sits down during the breaks in travel and writes a story; then they either exchange stories and read them, with everyone giving each story a rating, or perhaps each person would read his story aloud (in prose, of course) to the company. Probably the former; I agree with R. that most of us moderns don’t have an ear for oral discourse, or even stories; if there aren’t images to go with it we tend to have to take notes to figure out what’s being said. R. mentioned French preachers shouting and being very animated, but people still hardly understanding them; perhaps that’s because they hadn’t yet started adapting sermons to written culture with bulletins featuring outlines and partially written notes, handing out Bibles at the beginning of service, and displaying quotes by Power-point.

Something that I haven’t quite figured out about NaNoWriMo is whether these stories are actually meant to be read, as travelers’ tales were meant to be heard. As far as I can tell they aren’t. I have an acquaintance who has participated for the past few years, for instance, and she has a blog about her NaNoWriMo experience. It’s all meta-story stuff; no actual story, or characters, or excerpts, or anything with any actual story content. That seems common: on the NaNoWriMo message board there’s a lot of buzz about meta-story stuff; name generators, styles, word counts, dealing with writing block and writing stress, encouragement, complaint, and mutual support in general – I’ve failed to find an actual story or piece of a story or anything resembling a story, however. That, I think, must be an oddity of print culture. Because the novel itself is a physical object more than an oral story (an immaterial thing that must be told to have form), there’s a much greater possibility of private stories, where the mere fact that they’ve been written is sufficient, regardless of whether they affect any other human being. It takes us a step more away from Canterbury Tales, to a group of people who hang out together writing stories, but instead of then reading each-other’s stories and laughing about them, they refuse to give the stories out, and instead compare from a distance how long the stories are, and what structure they adhere to, what genera they’re in, how they came up with names for the characters, etc. I’m not certain why this is. It seems related to a culture and economic system that presses us to try to make money off of absolutely everything and be highly self-conscious of our written conventions. Every story is a potential publication. But the whole charm of NaNoWriMo is that it’s a bunch of amateurs who just want to write stories, even if they’re pretty bad – because it’s a human thing to tell stories, and we’re educated in such a way that it’s more natural for us to write stories than to tell them (unless they’re very short). Perhaps there’s something much more deeply personal and in need of protection, editing; much more like real labor in our narrative than in our opinion essays – though stories are by nature more like schole (leisure, study, contemplation) than labor. Is it because most of us have so much less practice at story telling than other forms of writing? Or because a novel is such a long story? Hmm.