From the Web site of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), telling about the experience of writing the first draft of a novel in one month:

The first year’s trials and tribulations are laid out in the introduction to No Plot? No Problem!, but the short version is that our novels, despite our questionable motives and pitiful experience, came out okay. Not great. But not horrible, either. And, more surprising than that, the writing process had been really, really fun.

Fun was something we hadn’t expected. Pain? Sure. Embarrassment? Yes. Crippling self-doubt followed by a quiet distancing of ourselves from the entire project? You bet.

But fun? Fun was a revelation. Novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.

I think NaNoWriMo is part of a wider trend of people having fun by making stuff (can’t quite call it art) and distributing it via the Web. Examples: the people who use iMovie or some other free video editing software to produce videos which they then distribute free via YouTube; the people who use GarageBand or other cheap audio editing software to produce songs which they distribute via Web sites; the blogs, of course; the mash-ups; the immense wave of creativity that we’re seeing.

Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 95% of everything is crap, still applies to this wave of creativity. Given our current cultural standards, that means we can’t call most of these creative endeavors “art,” because art is defined the 5% (or less) of everything that isn’t crap. Not that that is really the point. Yes, more than 50,000 people are writing NaNoWriMo novels, and probably 20,000 will actually complete their novel, so there might be 1,000 NaNoWriMo novels out there that might be worth reading (at least, they might be worth reading after they are throughly revised) — but the real point of doing it is because it’s fun.

Case in point: I’m now 11,148 words into writing my own NaNoWriMo novel, and yeah, it is fun. It is a whole lot of fun. It is far more fun than watching TV or reading someone else’s novel.