Keep looking--there's bound to be something good in all these pages.

Sonya Chung had an essay (“What We Teach When We Teach Writers: On The Quantifiable and the Uncertain”) in The Millions on Friday that’s an interesting companion to Nathan’s piece today on NaNoWriMo. As Nathan mentions, it’s a bit disconcerting that thousands of novels have been written since the inception of the contest and yet so many of them are crap and haven’t amounted to much (begging the question: what’s the point?). Chung doesn’t mention NaNoWriMo. Her essay is a reflection on teaching writing. And yet she seems to be saying that–echoing the contest’s demands to complete a certain amount of work every day–that there’s something to be said about just showing up having done something, anything. And that reflecting on the particulars of the work can help a writer find anchors that will stabilize themselves when they might otherwise feel rudderless and overwhelmed.

To start, Chung breaks down her monthly reading list for us. I learned she reads .84 books/week. On her website she posts her monthly reading list which appears not as a list so much as a blanket of jackets representing the books she’s reading at a given time. A nice visual referent for what someone else’s headspace is like at a given time.

Other quantifying markers that may seem arbitrary are an interesting preoccupation for her:

A writer friend of mine used to always report to me his short story in-progress word counts. I found this funny and endearing. When I was about halfway through a draft of my second novel, I started tracking my word counts and reporting them on my blog. It wasn’t funny to me, though, and probably not endearing to anyone else; I needed markers, a sense of how far I’d come and how far I thought I had to go. I was in the wilderness on this draft. Around the same time, another novelist friend started reporting his word counts on Facebook. I commented on one of his word-count posts: “Let’s make it en vogue to track and report word counts!” He replied, “Yes!”

To bring home a similar point, she quotes from a talk that Jennifer Egan gave to some Columbia MFA students about craft in which Egan says, “Every day I aim for five pages. It doesn’t matter how much time I spend, I could sit for three hours and not get any pages. I’m after the pages.”

But what about quality? After pages and pages and page of fluff, shouldn’t there be something that’s worth a damn?

The truth is that your pretty-good writing may very well get published and make you famous; it’s happened before. Your great writing may never see the light of day. Your really-good writing may get published and be read by very few. You may write something great this time around and something pretty-good next time around and something not-very-good-at-all a few years down the road and never get published at all. It’s happened before….I don’t decide these things. I’m only here to help you write better, because I think it’s important and worthwhile.

Her essay ends with the following admonishment for would-be writers:

It’s hard to write well. But it may be even harder to simply keep writing; which, by the way, is the only way to write better. In the meantime, aim for five pages. Report your word counts. Track your rate of reading (and consume books ravenously). Teach math on the side if you have to. Whatever you need to do.

Like I said, no mention or endorsement of NaNoWriMo by Chung, but if you’re thinking about taking the plunge these are probably decent words of advice. Oh, and don’t quit writing come December.