…it’s like aiming to walk 26 miles whilst wheezing asthmatically. And then admitting you’ll only manage 14.

I can see how you would think that if that’s what I’d said. But I didn’t. I merely expressed doubt that I could make it. When I went on my sponsored cycle around Malawi, I doubted that I could cycle for 60 miles a day on rough terrain under the African sun. But, in general, that’s what I managed, and I was both impressed with and surprised by myself.

Why not set yourself the target of 8,000 good words, and have a useful finished product?

Because that’s a different challenge which I’ve achieved before and have little doubt that I can achieve again. Because that doesn’t feel like a challenge that I’d enjoy doing. Because having a “useful finished product” does not interest me. Why should I be trying to write 8,000 ‘good’ words (by who’s standards?) when it doesn’t seem even remotely like something that I’d enjoy or could quantify?

Doing NaNoWriMo to improve your writing is like running ten miles a day to practise for a fencing competition.

I disagree. But I think perhaps you’re focussing too much on the process, and not on the aftermath. Being forced to drive oneself to write a ludicrous number of words in a short space of time will produce something which is likely to be – at best – unpolished… and quite possibly sloppier still. However, being able to look over what kind of quality one can produce at that ‘rate’ will give a far better indication of how one should attempt to write in future. In addition, going back and improving, drawing from, or changing that work can produce something that is worthy of merit… worthy even of publication (as has been demonstrated by several NaNoWriMo-ers in the past).

…there are better ways to spend your already-packed time…

If I wanted to improve my writing and that alone, I wouldn’t do NaNoWriMo. Similarly, if I wanted to improve my cycling skills, I would never have cycled around Malawi? So why do you think I did do it? Perhaps if you can understand that, you can understand this.

But you can’t accomplish anything in a project for which you have no expectations.

Also true, but I also never said that I have no expectations. In fact, I have several expectations. The first one is that I expect that I will fail. The second, and even more important one, is that I expect that I will flog myself half to death in an attempt to succeed. Perhaps I might. But to say that I have no expectations when I explicitly used the word “expect” in my post demonstrates a genuine lack of understanding in what I was trying to say. But then, you’ve already confessed a lack of understanding in the whole thing (“I still don’t understand the point of this…”), and I don’t know how I would go about changing that, even if I cared to: which, in the greater part, I don’t.