A friend of mine (who you shall be able to hear on the forthcoming Ferretbrain Podcast) recently took upon herself the mantle of Resident NaNoWriMo Temptress, and set about persuading several members of Ferretbrain to join her in committing to "do NaNo".

I've always been a bit sceptical about NaNoWriMo, I first heard about it years ago, but it pushed all the wrong buttons. This is chiefly because the pitch I heard back in 2003 or whenever basically went "NaNo is your chance to Be A Writer for a month" and if there's one thing I can't abide it's the obsession people have with "being a writer." At the time I knew an awful lot of people who wanted to be writers, but very few of them seemed to actually want to write anything. A cursory glance at the Google ads that came through with my NaNo confirmation email only confirms the fact that most people are totally wrongheaded about this sort of thing. I can click any one of a half-dozen links right now and be transported to a host of websites which promise to tell me how to become a bestselling author overnight with as little emphasis as possible on the tedious preamble of actually writing anything, and it's this attitude amongst so many wannabe "writers" that put me off the whole thing for about five years.

Our NaNo Seductress is a big fan of a book called The Right to Write which encourages a different approach. The analogy she uses is that if you see somebody kicking a football around in a park, you don't tell them that they should stop because they're never going to be a professional footballer. The more I thought about that, the more it bugged me: you don't tell people to stop doing DIY because they're not going to qualify as plumbers, and millions of parents get their kids to have music lessons despite none of them having any realistic expectation of making a living out of it. It's almost exclusively writing which has this peculiar standard associated with it, and I've spent the last couple of days trying to work out why.

Here's what I've come up with.

I've heard it said that the difference between talent and genius is that talent this: talent is when somebody does something that you can't do; genius is when they do things that you cannot imagine doing. Interestingly I've heard the same description used to distinguish between "regular" genius and a rarer variety of the same, which possibly goes to show how the word has been devalued by overuse.

I think the key to the strange status of writing lies in this distinction. If I see somebody painting a realistic picture of a bowl of fruit, I think to myself "gosh, that person is very good at painting" but ultimately I recognise that their ability to paint bowls of fruit is a skill that they have learned and which I too could (at least in theory) also learn. On the other hand if I look at the Sistine Chapel then as well as appreciating the craft of the whole thing ("gosh, that picture of Adam is proportioned in a manner which closely approximates reality") I will also be blown away by the sheer wonder of it all. In painting there is, for want of a less pretentious way of describing it, an equal measure of the technical and the sublime. Even though somebody's painting of a bowl of fruit is never going to be a defining feature of European culture, I can still recognise the technical skill involved in creating it.

Writing is different. I could never have painted the Sistine Chapel, because I don't know how to paint, but I could have written Hamlet. All I would have had to do was put the words in the right order. It's a bit tacky I know, but it does actually come back to the monkeys and the typewriter, a novel or a play is just a collection of words that everybody knows, written down in a particular way. It does not have, or does not appear to have, the same technical elements as painting, or music or for that matter football.

It all brings us back to the idea of genius: a writer doesn't do anything you can't do, they do things you didn't think of doing. It's this, I think, that gives writing its mysterious quality, and which accounts for the peculiar attitude people have towards it. Because writing does not require any obvious technical skills, it follows that writers must be special kinds of people, possessed of a gift from whichever God you believe in that allows them to do things that other people never dream of. The reason so many people want to be writers, even when they often don't particularly enjoy the act of writing, is because of this all-too-understandable belief that a Writer is something different from normal people. It's like the Family Romance for twentysomethings, except instead of "there aren't my real parents, I'm really a magical princess" it's "this isn't my real life, I'm really a Writer."

This idea that Being a Writer is some kind of transcendent state distinct from the physical act of writing is probably one of the most pernicious (I love the word "pernicious" - it's got such a great sound to it) and destructive ones affecting the craft. The disease is so endemic, however, that the mere idea that "writing" is something that can be done by ordinary people causes bouts of apoplexy, particularly amongst a certain variety of published author. A large number of people who object to things like NaNo seem to do so out of a strange sense of outrage that just anybody can sling fifty thousand words together and call it a novel. This is rather like objecting to a child's drawing of his father being called a picture.

People object to NaNoWriMo because they cling to the idea that "novel" means "published work of fiction," or even more specifically, "published work of fiction possessing great literary merit, such that it should rightly be ranked alongside Hemingway, Dickens and of course me." That's why so many comic books are so keen to redefine themselves as "graphic novels" - the term carries with it an implication of merit. The idea that the word "novel" simply implies a work of fiction which follows a single storyline and is long enough that you wouldn't really call it a short story is anathema to many people, because it flies in the face of the prevailing notion that Novels are mystical artefacts created by a race of demigods from before the dawn of time.

John Hegley has a poem that goes like this:

The first time that I wrote in verse
Was about the age of ten.
George said, "That's just like a real poem Miss,"
And Miss said, "That is a real poem, George"
And I've been a poet since then.

And that, right there, is what NaNo is about. It's about recognising that, just like poetry, just like music, just like football, writing isn't magic. This November, hundreds of thousands of people will produce novels. Most of them will be bad novels, some of them will be unreadably awful novels, but they will all, never the less, be real novels. Some novelists (a few real ones, a whole load of wannabe ones) will get mortally offended at the idea that the exalted title of "novel" can be bestowed upon what will be, for the most part, unmitigated crap.

Personally, I'm throwing in my hat with the people who are going to spend November writing, instead the people who are going to spend it talking about being writers.