Maybe. I just say I don’t understand it nor share the enthusiasm for the idea. Now, of course, if people have fun doing it, by all means, they should do it.

Quality is not a criteria in these challenges, for who would judge it? The nano organisers make much of reminding people that the only person you can cheat in the challenge is yourself. So participants must judge for themselves if it is worth it to *them* to prioritise a completed project, for this one month, over the possible restraints on ‘the best they can do’.

If the challenges are of value to their participants, if they can find it part of their wider ‘process’, isn’t that enough?

Where I differ is that I would not be able to feel I have achieved something if the content does not matter.

Art means work, the process. But I think SoFoBoMo pushes the concept too far. I think it is a drive to create empty, superficial, “Mc Donald’s” art.

Some people can motivate and complete projects without such a challenge, some of us find it harder and an online challenge can offer us benefits:
- a fixed timescale, it might take over your life, but only for a month. That’s manageable.
- support and community. When the going is tough it can be a great help to know there are others going through the same thing, to hear how they are coping, share tips and strategies…. I found that the act of being encouraging to others gave me great motivation to practice what I was preaching.
- the making of a public statement of intent. For lots of us this is a great motivator.
-Process. I had harboured a notion of writing for years but was fairly clueless. The defined timescale helped me focus research on process and then I just had to take the leap and *do* it.
-Learning. I learned more about how to write by *doing* it than I ever would thinking about it, making tentative starts and thinking it wasn’t good enough and giving up…

Neither Nano nor Sobo *stop* people making/writing a book that takes longer, is more highly crafted, better. But they can give people the boost to get started. You may not produce the best work of your life, but you produce a step towards it. If you wait until you are ready to write a Booker winner you may never start. For many of us the best book is the one that we succeeed in getting *out* of our heads and into the world.