10 Writing Lessons Learned from Toho's Godzilla Series

As writers, we can only dream about the sort of success the Godzilla series has seen. I mean, the first film came out 60 years ago. There are thirty movies, tons of merchandize, videogames, comics, and novels, too! Godzilla has been through a lot of ups and downs over the years, but the creation has staying power. 

Maybe we can learn a thing or two from the big guy...



1) Don’t be afraid to evolve to meet the audience’s demands—In the 1954 original, Godzilla was depicted as the walking embodiment of the nuclear bomb. What the beast brought to Tokyo was a glimpse not only of horrors past, but of a potential apocalyptic future. Less than a decade later, Godzilla movies were full of humor, wonder, and escapism. The message of nuclear holocaust was sidelined in favor of monster fights, likable heroes, and a softer Godzilla. The dark origins of the monster were touched on here and there, but for a while there Godzilla became a giant superhero, thus satisfying the demands of children (of all ages) who wanted to root for the monster instead of fear him. There’s a lesson here. I love the original film – it’s a grim masterpiece and one of the best sci-fi/horror movies of all time. I would not have minded if more Godzilla films were made in a similar tone. However, I have no doubt that the shift in tone is what allowed the series to go on as long as it has. Get an idea of what your audience wants and do your best to deliver.

2) Monsters and metaphors—Science fiction and horror give us the chance to tackle the problems of the day in an indirect way, allowing us to have our message without being pretentious about it. This is important. If you talk to someone for an hour about what you feel is wrong with the world, then chances are they will only hear some annoying buzzing in their ear. However, if you disguise your message as a monster, an alien invader, an invention, fictional political unrest, or whatever, then you’ll sneak your message in there without people getting bored by it. With any luck, it’ll take hold. This is especially good for young readers, as they’re more willing to learn a lesson from a monster.

3) Crank that shit out—The film industry of Japan was a well-oiled machine in the 1960s. There was one year where Japan’s output outmatched even Hollywood’s (right now, the Japanese film industry is in the dumps, but that’s a lesson for another day). You could pretty much count on a new Godzilla film every year – sometimes two new films! – not to mention other similar kaiju epics. Toho found something that audiences loved and the studio supplied the demand. Only when the money started to run out did you notice a dip in quality. Otherwise these were some damn fine films that people still watch today. If your audience wants your next book/movie/sequel/work, give it to them. Don’t sit on it forever. No dillydallying. Give us more and give it to us NOW. Stephen King understands. John Grisham gets it. Marvel knows what I’m talking about. Takashi Miike does his thing. George RR Martin? Well…

4) Don’t recycle—Toho’s money started to run out in the 1970s. The Japanese film industry was getting killed off by TV. Film studios were shut down. Toho marched on, though I don’t think it will ever return to the greatness it once was in the 50s and 60s. Godzilla continued, also, but on a smaller budget than before. Listen: Recycling will save the world. Maybe. I mean, right? Well, yes, recycling is good for Mother Earth – but it has no place in your fiction. Godzilla films from the 70s period were fond of reusing footage from earlier films as a way of cutting costs. The problem was, we came to these movies for monster action, and we’ve seen those shots before. It’s the literary equivalent of copying cool stuff from an earlier book and pasting it into the new one. DON’T DO THAT. Even if your ‘recycling’ is not as severe as a copy-and-paste job, you should know that your audience remembers stuff. Other Godzilla films that did not recycle footage still managed to recycle ideas. We noticed. And though not as unforgivable as using stock footage, the use of ‘stock ideas’ is kind of lame. Throw your aluminum in the properly marked can, but don’t recycle your ideas.

5) The shift from villain to anti-hero—Godzilla used to want to kill everybody. Then he started saving the world. This wasn’t overnight. And, in my opinion, it didn’t feel forced. Godzilla, at his best, is one of the better examples of an anti-hero in all of filmdom. You’ve got this behemoth that sets cities ablaze but still manages to save the day in the end, almost as if his heroics were accidental. And I like that. People dig the rogue. If you and your audience love your villain and he’s something that you feel you can turn into a heroic figure, I say go for it. Just be mindful that you don’t change him so much that you destroy what we liked about him in the first place. Like, you can change a tiger’s stripes but don’t remove his claws. Hmm. Yes, something like that.

6) Recognize when the hero can step back—Godzilla is not the star of all of his films. Actually, a great deal of them feature other monsters more than Big G. Sometimes a supporting character takes off in a way you’d never expect. Don’t smother them, let them share the spotlight with the central lead. Sometimes one likable hero is not enough to keep people coming back. Recognize the talent of your roster and give ‘em time to shine.

7) The Shinichi Sekizawa approach—The common monster story formula goes something like this: Monsters mess shit up and people gotta fix it. Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa came up with a new formula: People mess shit up and monsters gotta fix it. Sekizawa managed to save an increasingly tired genre by turning it on its head. Look for a way to do the same.

8) Crossovers—A couple of the most profitable Godzilla films of all time are Godzilla vs. Mothra and King Kong vs. Godzilla. What do they have in common? Both Mothra and Kong started out with their own movies before meeting up with Godzilla. Consider this: you’ve written multiple works and have noticed different people are gravitating towards two different series/characters. Why not write something where those characters either team up or are pitted against one another? You may succeed in bringing fans from either series together, thus doubling your audience.

9) Let’s all get along—I like dark, brooding works of fiction, but it need not always be that way. Director Ishiro Honda believed in the best of humanity, despite having seen some of the worst of it in WWII. In his films, he was fond of depicting the world coming together to solve its problems. Angst is popular (look at Batman) but aren’t we a little tired of everybody trying to do the same thing with the ‘dark and gritty’ approach? Think about this simple truth: It is a good thing to stand out from the pack.

10) Have some fun—There’s this thing about Godzilla films that I love but do not fully understand, this sort of childlike innocence on display. It cancels out my inner critic. I just sit back and smile. I’m a cynical guy by nature so this is no easy task. These films tapped into something that I cannot define, but I have learned something from the experience anyway: simply, have some fun. Smile a little. Enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. And whenever possible, try to tap into your child at heart. It’s important. If you’re not having fun with your creative endeavors, then you gotta fix that. 

And that's that.


(image from 1954 film Godzilla AKA Gojira AKA Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Godzilla is owned by Toho Co., Ltd. Please don't sue me, lawyers of Toho. Okay? Thank you)

10 Writing Lessons Learned from MST3K

The crew of the Satellite of Love: Joel, Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo.

I expect many of you are familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (otherwise known as MST3K). If not, let me give a brief explanation: MST3K was a comedy TV show that ran through much of the 90s. It showed bad sci-fi/horror/exploitation films, while robots and a human host ridiculed the films from a shadow theater. 

MST3K is one of my favorite shows of all time. Some of the movies are so unbelievably bad that watching them would be insufferable were it not for the constant laughs supplied by the MST writers. It recently occurred to me that I might have actually learned a creative lesson or two from the show. Some of these lessons were learned from the sharp humor of the show’s writers, other lessons were learned from watching such bad films and realizing what mistakes should not be repeated.

So here we go.

1— Don’t make your heroes infinitely superior to the villains, or “Your weapons are useless against me!” – I’m not a fan of Superman. THERE I SAID IT! He has a fix-it superpower for almost every imaginable situation. But he’s not the worst abuser of the overpowered hero problem. No, the worst might be PRINCE OF SPACE, an awful Japanese sci-fi superhero, and the star of one of my favorite MST3K episodes. Basically, nothing kills this Prince guy. In the film, some weird chicken people from outer space come to enslave humanity… but they weren’t counting on Prince of Space! They shoot him with lasers and rockets and stuff and he just stands there like a bastard, absorbing everything they throw at him before shouting, “Your weapons are useless against me!” This happens on repeat for basically the entire film and the chicken aliens NEVER LEARN. The point is this: have some back and forth. I mean, I’m sure most of us want the heroes to win in the end, but we want to see them flirt with failure, too. Make your villains mighty in some way. Let them crush enough of the hero’s world so that the hero is forced to rebuild. And if you really want to go with an unbalanced power struggle, it’s typically better to go with villains who are stronger than the heroes every time.

2— Don’t try to say something when there’s really nothing worth saying, or “Focusing my attention on the good and the beautiful.” – Dig this exchange from the film The Phantom Planet. First, some setting: two astronauts are flying through space and there’s a lull in the action, giving one of the dudes a chance to get deep. He says, “You know, Captain, every year of my life I grow more and more convinced that the wisest and the best is to focus our attention on the good and the beautiful, if we just take the time to look at it.” To which the Captain replies, “You’re some guy.” Seriously. Momma always said if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. My version: If your characters don’t have anything worth saying, glue their lips shut. It’d be different if this wonderful nugget of dialogue meant something to the story. It doesn’t. There are many examples of this kind of an attempt at getting deep and profound, even in good books and film. It’s excusable but only as long as the dialogue is rich or actually meaningful in some way. But if it just sits there, doing nothing other than making you go HUH? then you gotta cut it out like a cancer and toss it in the biohazard bin.

3— Not every genius must be an eccentric, or “You’re weird, which results in creativity.” – In the bad movies shown on MST3K, artists and geniuses are often times presented as goofy eccentrics. Seriously, you don’t need to be a weirdo to be creative. They don’t necessarily go hand in hand. There’s nothing wrong with weird—I like weird. But it’s not a character requirement for crafting an intelligent inventor, writer, painter, scientist, whatever. Some creative people are actually kind of boring. IT’S TRUE!

4—Don’t make your characters pat you on the back, or “I sing whenever I sing whenever I sing!”—I don’t like it when characters in a book/film remark how eloquent, cool, original, or charming another character is… especially when I, as a member of the audience, fail to see what’s so cool about the dude they’re in love with. It just bothers me. It’s the writer patting him/herself on the back with what they feel is a great character and wonderful dialogue. If you’re writing a comedy, don’t have your characters laughing at the one-liners. If you’re writing an inspirational speech, don’t have a member of the audience remark, “How inspirational!” It’s too obvious. It’s insincere. It’s obnoxious. There’s this do-gooder kid in MST3K’s The Giant Gila Monster who writes and sings his own songs. The kid is devoid of originality but everyone seems to love his music anyway. A radio guy wants to make him into a star with his likely-soon-to-be hit song, which features the chorus, “I sing whenever I sing whenever I sing.” Oy… But even films that have not received the MST3K treatment are guilty of similar sins. Oliver Stone recently made the poor choice to direct a sequel to Wall Street. The sequel is not very good but it’s not an awful film. There is, however, an awful sequence where Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko is giving a lecture to students. The lecture is full of one-liners in a desperate attempt to strike gold again and find the next “Greed is good.” No gold is ever found, but in the audience Shia LaBeouf is eating it up. Shia’s in awe and thinks Gekko is awesome. Except, what Gekko’s saying isn’t awesome. I mean, it sure isn’t “greed is good” awesome. As a result, the scene sinks, the Shia character seems like a fanboy for all the wrong reasons, and instead of being happy to have Gekko back we’re mostly just thinking how much happier we’d all be watching the original Wall Street instead. Also, Shia LaBeouf sucks. But anyway, onto #5!

5— If you offer a warning, follow up on it, or “Watch out for snakes!”—Ever heard the written rule… or maybe it’s unwritten. I mean, I never read it, so I don’t know… anyway, ever heard the rule that says if you reveal a gun hidden in a drawer at the beginning, then you gotta have a character use it before the end? While I would normally agree that rules are made to be broken, my time watching MST3K movies has led me to believe this is one you should pay attention to. There are many bad movies that offer up a warning to the characters, but then zero conflict results from this. The ‘gun in the drawer’ rule is a promise to the audience about conflict still to come. Not following up on it is a broken promise and those are BAD. There is this one movie, I believe it was Monster-A-Go-Go, a horror story about a town gripped by fear when a mysterious monster stalks the night… The film ends with one of the characters simply saying, “There was no monster.” Um, okay? Why the hell was I watching your monster movie then?

6—The sequence that goes on forever, or “Saaaaaandstoooooorm!” – Ever gotten to a part in a book or film that just refuses to end? There’s probably a good chance that sequence is there simply to pad the story and give it some length at the sacrifice of your enjoyment. Rock climbs and sandstorms are the mortal enemies of the crew of the Satellite of Love. Not sure why it is, but many MST3K films turn to sandstorms to pad out their running time. Weird. I think the filmmaker’s intentions were to show us the character’s enduring suffering on some level, but all we get are some guys walking through drab shots of shit flying past the camera. NOT FUN. To the filmmakers of Hercules Against the Moon Men: you’re not David Lean and this ain’t Lawrence of Arabia… I’ll always believe it’s better to write a story that’s too short than to write one that’s too long.  

7—Poorly written comic relief characters, or “Oh, for fun!” –While I prefer humor to be sprinkled about in the dialogue by all characters, there are plenty of successful works where most the humor comes from a single comic relief character. Which is fine. But! When you have a script full of humor that’s spread amongst the cast of characters, it’s easier to let the lame ducks slide. However! When you have a script with a single comic relief character, it’s much harder to ignore when his/her jokes fall flat. Your readers may begin dreading the appearance of the jokester and soon enough even the okay jokes feel like a cold shower. Actors say dying is easy and comedy is hard. Let me expand on that: comedy is hard, playing the comic relief is a bitch. The humor better hit the mark, the character better be well-written, and if it’s a film/TV show then the actor better be up to task. Otherwise you get a character like Dropo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians… acting like an idiot every scene… and the only people laughing are the ones with written orders to do so. (One extra thought on this: drunk humor was apparently funny once upon a time. I guess. I mean, I imagine some people found the drunken comic relief guy from The Giant Gila Monster funny back in the day. Maybe not. Either way, he’s not funny now.)

8— The inequality of gender on film, or “Bad touch!”—There’s this trend in fifties/sixties B-movies where the female characters are presented as being, well, really stupid. Even the smart ones! A woman could be a scientist, a journalist, a doctor, a princess, whatever, but by the third act she basically stops coming up with ideas and steps aside for the male hero (who the woman inevitably falls in love with, even if he’s an asshole—ESPECIALLY if he’s an asshole). Your female character should have more to offer the story other than just being available for the hero’s celebratory sex when he saves the day. I mean, come on. I single out the fifties and sixties, but the simple truth is that little has really changed. Women get more respect now, but feminism is still treated like a dirty word. A step towards correcting that is writing stronger female roles in fiction. Women don’t need a man to save them all the time—they can save themselves and sometimes they can save the guys. Women don’t need to have marriage be their ultimate goal in life—sometimes they’re happy the way they are. And so on. In recent years, Marvel and The Hunger Games are doing a lot of good in changing people’s minds as far as what a girl can do in fiction and fantasy (this is especially important for young boys, I think). But the problem’s not solved, so don’t slack on this issue. Treat all women with respect, even the ones that you created in your head. 

9— When you submit your work to the world, be ready for the criticism, or “…the hell?”—While I would never condone bashing fanfiction or the work of budding artists, the people who made the films which appeared on MST3K were professionals—or at least they liked to think so. As a professional artist, you’re hoping people are going to love your work. However, you must remain aware that the door is open for people to hate your work and make fun of you, too. Right or wrong doesn’t matter. As a professional your work is now going to be part of a great, big ocean—and the ocean is full of sharks with blogs, Amazon reviews, and twitter accounts. There’s a story about an MST3K episode for the movie Time Chasers, which was an ultra-low budget sci-fi film about time travel. The story goes that the filmmakers were huge fans of MST3K and were delighted to have their film featured on the show… but apparently they weren’t ready for the wisecracks that Mike and the bots made while watching their film. Supposedly their thinking was that the movie was going to impress in some way, and that MST3K might stop their jokes and go, “Hey, this is pretty good!” Time Chasers is not one of the worst films to ever appear on the show (far from it), but it’s not good either. And one must remember the point of the show is to have fun with the film they’re watching. I feel kind of bad for the Time Chasers crew, but really, what were they expecting?

10— Write your story your way, or “The right people will get it.” – One of the central ideas of MST3K’s humor is that not everyone will get every joke. The right people will understand certain jokes that fly right over other viewer’s heads. And that’s okay. The show doesn’t dumb itself down to be understood by the whole crowd. Whether you’re writing comedy, drama, or genre fiction, know that the right people will get what you’re trying to do. You can’t satisfy everyone, so don’t even try. Play the fool, make your heroes ugly, get all twisted, give us a dash of your weird sense of humor. You’re gonna confuse some people but the rest of us will love ya for it. 

Thanks for reading. 

Push the button, Frank.

THE GRIEF CLICHÉ: a rant

“I left because every time I looked at your face, I saw our little boy/girl/dog/whatever…”

The next time I hear that line I’m gonna scream. It’s one of the most overused and least talked about clichés in fiction and film.

Today, I’m calling you out, GRIEF CLICHÉ.

I think we have all experienced grief at some point in our lives. We deal with that grief in our own way. Some of us get angry. Others withdraw. Some become self-destructive. Most of us find a way to move on, to build ourselves back up again, and live. 

So why do storytellers routinely return to this sad cliché of human emotion? Short answer: it’s easier. But let’s look into it for a second.

Fiction is often meant as an escape from the world. So perhaps this cliché is comforting, as we have seen and heard it before, and therefore we know it’s safe. It’s lazy fiction.  It’s not going to break our heart the same as real, organic DEEP HURTING grown on the farm of human pain and loss.

Do we not want to know the character’s grief in any singular way? Do we prefer the safety net that such clichés grant us? I think the cliché offers some distance between the story and its readers. Maybe that’s a necessary thing when the goal is not to bring people down. 

But maybe I’m giving a lazy cliché too much thought. Too much credit. TOO MUCH WORDS.

How I see it. . .

The “every time I looked at your face, I saw…” basically requires the characters to push away from each other, often times resulting in the destruction of the family unit. It puts the characters into a tailspin until (usually) they find a way to love each other again.

Fucking BLARGH. The line is so overused that I no longer believe in the situation or the characters—especially not their reconciliation. 

A single line of recycled dialogue does not make for believable character development. Maybe it used to, back when the cliché was young, but not anymore.

One of the obvious requirements of fiction is that you create conflict for your characters. And then maybe, just maybe, they find a way to put their lives back together before the Epilogue runs out of ink.Chances are that your characters are going to experience grief or loss in some way. Maybe you don’t have the sort of story where the topic cliché would even apply. But regardless, you should find your own way of detailing their inner conflict. 

Give us tragedy or give us comedy, I do not care. But goddammit, please give us originality!

Grief ain’t easy, folks. There may be some truth to the topic cliche, but still. It’s not the sort of thing that should be explained away with a single line of dialogue and left at that. Give us more.

Listen: No one sees the world the way that you do. It’s what makes you valuable as a writer. Indeed, it’s what makes every person on the planet a potential storyteller in the making. So give us your version of things—your TRUTH. Don’t regurgitate what’s been done before because it’s safe and easy. That’s no fun. Build your sandcastle your own way, step on it however you please, and we will rejoice.

Writing advice you never asked for: Make 'Em Suffer

“Life is suffering and suffering is life.”

~sounds like a quote from an Ingmar Bergman film~

No life is worth living in which we are not challenged in some way.

No book is worth reading when the characters are not similarly challenged.

I’m sorry to say it, but there are some bad days ahead for all of us. It’s true. Know what though? There are plenty of bad days behind us, too. But we survived those bastards, so we can sure as hell survive whatever the future has in store. Because we’re smarter now, stronger somehow, and maybe a little bit braver. The bad days have helped define who and what we are just as much as the happy days.

A tale with characters that learn nothing, fight the easy fight, and come out unscathed is worthless to me. You have to make them suffer in some way to bring about change. You have to show them at their worst before they can be their best. You have to break them before they can ever be whole.

That’s not to say that everything need be depressing. You don’t need to pour that suffering on like syrup over pancakes (I like the Butter Pecan syrup the most myself -- but that's not important, I suppose). You should get an idea of a reader’s expectations before you decide to make the main character a one-eyed little girl who can’t walk or talk and lost her puppy last year to Tropical Storm Billy. Different genres have different expectations of a character’s crisis. For example, comedies full of death can either be bold or off-putting. Know what you write and write what you know. You know?

A character’s suffering can come in many ways. A divorce? A zombie horde taking everything the hero has ever known? The super villain who wants to reveal the hero’s day job? The serial killer who works in such a way that it’s driving the protagonist to the edge? The death of a loved one? The painful misunderstanding that led to the loss of a friend? 

Crisis. Sadness. Suffering. Madness. Pain. Depression. Oppression. Love/Loss. Whatever.

We can draw from our own lives if it’s applicable or we can draw (carefully) from real-world happenings or fictional dramas. There’s no rule for where you have to get your inspiration. Suffering can be very real or very unreal, but it’s required in some way to make the characters real. 

It’s the fuel that drives all fiction.

Without it, your fiction is born lifeless, with nowhere to go, with nothing to learn, and without a reader who cares.

So give ‘em hell.

NaNoWriMo: Why it's cool, why it's not for everyone, and why that's okay

This was my first year participating in NaNoWriMo. Here are some rambling thoughts on my own experiences and what I think of the 'competition.'

Why it’s cool: 

There is a group of people who will tell you that NaNoWriMo is pointless because no one in the publishing field will read your work. Or worse, they claim that the competition is giving non-writers the unlicensed right to feel like real writers for a month, and that all they may produce is shit. First, give the finger to all those people, then read on…

NaNoWriMo is cool simply because it encourages you to write, to be creative, and to stare at the dragon beast that is the white page and conquer it one word at a time. We need art. It’s part of being human. We soak up the art around us every day, sometimes unknowingly, and it makes us who we are. 

Inside every one of us is the ability to tell a story. Is that story necessarily meant for the world to see? Maybe not. Could be that it’s meant for you alone, whether you like it or not. But don’t despair. Realize how many people have talked about ‘that novel I want to write one day’ but how few have actually written it. You’re in a select group now. You’re a writer regardless of whether you have a book deal or not. And if you enjoyed the process, you can always write another, and then another (and it doesn’t have to be written in November either). You’ll get better over time, trust me. Maybe when you reach that fifth book, you’ll have something truly worthy of sharing with the world. Or you know, you could you be that genius who gets it right the first time. In which case, you scare me. . . But really, what I mean to say is that art matters. So, if you can, give some art back to the world. And if the world’s not ready for it (or if you’re not ready for the world), then at least your art has enriched your life in some way, and that matters perhaps more than anything.

But there’s also this togetherness to NaNoWriMo. The ‘competition’ is mostly devoid of actual competition, at least with your peers. It’s more like a marathon where everyone’s cheering each other on. The finish line is all that matters, no matter who reaches it first. There’s something awesome and rare about that kind of a creative community.

Will many WriMoers see their books available at Barnes & Noble one day? No, but I think we all knew that already going in, and the people who want to claim the competition is about getting published miss the point. Imagine a world where we actively discouraged our youth, our friends, our family, to avoid doing anything creative. That’s some awful dystopia shit right there. But we don’t live in that world. NaNoWriMo is proof of that. So, that’s cool.

Why it’s not for everyone:

There is something about NaNoWriMo that I do not like. It’s this idea of winning. I mean, I get it’s a competition of sorts, but I think it could potentially send the wrong message to certain new writers that if they fail, then they must not be cut out for the whole being a writer thing.

Speaking personally, the idea of writing every day is nothing new to me. I tend to write with chapter goals in mind as compared to a word count, but I rather liked the NaNoWriMo site’s daily count doodad. And while I think the whole NaNoWriMo thing was exactly what I expected it to be, I found that I wrote in a way totally unlike myself, and I’m not sure if I liked that. 

Driven by a force that I’ve not yet come to identify, I wrote every day in November at a speed that I was not accustomed to. At first, I thought, ‘well this is great!’ But then comes that point in nearly every novel I write, where I gotta stop and look at things as the story threatens to derail itself.

Except in NaNoWriMo, with a clock ticking on me, I didn’t give myself what I deemed the appropriate amount of time to reexamine what the story was meant to be and where I wanted it to go. I worked like a hungry shark, fearful that if I stopped going forward, I might sink to the bottom and die. 

Disclaimer: I don’t enjoy rewriting much. This is something I mean to work on as a writer, but for now it’s just who I am. When my story’s done, I like it to be relatively well groomed, so that the editing process goes more smoothly. . . I’ve never written a sloppier book than I did this November. I already want to edit it, but I know it’s too soon (wait 3-4 weeks to edit your finished manuscript—doctor’s orders). I accomplished what NaNoWriMo asked of me, but there’s this emptiness I feel, because the book’s not quite what I wanted it to be when I started it. 

I came to this conclusion that a writer should be suspicious of deadlines, but personal goals are something to be actively encouraged. 

NaNoWriMo is a great but flawed thing. It encourages us to tell the story we want to tell, but doesn’t grant enough freedom to the storyteller. 

Listen: Writing is a very personal craft. We all do it a little differently, which is why the ‘rules’ on how to write a great book are mostly to be ignored. There should be no rules on how you write your work day-to-day, or a sense of failure if you do not reach the number at the end of the month.

Ultimately, NaNoWriMo may not be for you. Don’t be discouraged if you wrote less than the competition asked of you in November. I ‘won’ the competition and got a little certificate to print up and put my name on. Also got this, check it: 

Yeah.

In no way does that certificate prove I’m a better writer than the ones who couldn’t reach 50,000. Someone else who took three months to complete their novel instead of three weeks might’ve produced something much better than I did. Really, I’m certain of it.

I think that if you’re already pretty comfortable with writing, then NaNoWriMo will be useful to you if you need something egging you on and keeping you honest about your daily writing. It can potentially instill good writing habits into your daily routine.

It could also potentially lead you to despair because the idea of ‘losing’ is never a good thing, especially when the competition isn’t totally fair to begin with. 

I guess I mean to say that you should NaNoWriMo at your own risk.

…and why that’s okay:

You didn’t get your book finished in November? That’s cool with me. It should be cool with you. The little badge thing that NaNoWriMo gives your profile page for 50,000 words is overrated, like a toy thrown into a cereal box. IT’S THE CEREAL THAT MATTERS!

It’s cool to be able to say that you wrote a complete book in a month’s time. I mean, holy shit, what an accomplishment. But it’s just as cool to say you wrote your book your way, even if writing it spilled over into the next year a little bit.

Some writers actively hate on NaNoWriMo for an abundance of reasons. Some of their reasons I can even agree with, but mostly I feel like we should just let it be.

There exists a competition that encourages people to write, to interact, and to build something with their MIND POWERS. That’s so cool. Lots of the participants in NaNoWriMo may not write at any other time of the year and that’s fine. November means something to them that it may not mean to the rest of us who think about writing every month of the year. Don’t ruin it for them. 

There are lots of things I don’t like about NaNoWriMo. I’m not even totally satisfied with my own experience with the project, despite the fact that I did everything they asked of me. But let’s not forget that it’s a powerful motivational activity for a great many people. 

Let the WriMos go on WriMoing. 

For those still fighting to finish before the 30^th. . . 

I believe that there’s still plenty of time for most of you to get your work done before December’s arrival. But if you don’t make it, that’s fine. Don’t beat yourself up about it. 

I do ask that you keep writing in December, though. Hell, if it keeps going on into 2014, that’s fine, too. Keep writing until you finish your thing. 

If there is one thing that I’d like you to take away from all my rambling, it is this:

The requirement for every book should not be the length of time it takes to finish it, or the number of words hidden between the covers, but rather the fact that it says THE END on the final page.

Finishing your work is what matters most.

And writing THE END feels so damn good.

I’m done now.

THE END.