Today is the start of the oddly-shortened NaNoWriMo, which is described on its official website thusly:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved [italics added].

I honestly don't know how I feel about this kind of thing, so I'm going to relate a little story that a professor told me in undergrad. It goes like this: Three men go golfing. Two of the men are writers and know each other, one being the other's mentor.  The third is a heart surgeon, and is just meeting the other two.  They introduce themselves, but the younger writer is a little embarrassed to admit to a doctor what he does for a living, writing novels. He explains that he's also a college teacher and administrator.

The older writer says simply, "I'm a novelist." 

The heart surgeon has a lot of questions about the "writing life," and reveals somewhere around the ninth hole that he has always harbored a secret desire to write a novel.  "I have this great idea, and I have all the characters," he says.  "One of these day, I'm just going to take a sabbatical, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just write." 

The younger of the writers encourages the surgeon, and listens for the next few holes as he describes his idea for a novel.  He asks questions to let the surgeon know he's interested.  He offers him advice on how to get his novel published once he writes it.  The elder writer is silent during all of this.  The three men finish their game.

As they're parting and shaking hands, the older writer, suddenly very animated, says to the heart surgeon, "You know, I've always had this idea that I was meant to be a surgeon.  I think I'd be pretty good at it.  I have all the tools and drugs and stuff.  One of these days, I'm just going to take six months off, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just cut people open.  Just get in there and dig around!"

Of course, the heart surgeon is pissed, and the younger writer is horrified, but the older novelist has got his point across: writing is a profession like any other, like medicine, and requires more than enthusiasm and a little time.

Now, I'm all for encouraging people, especially young people, to go into writing as a profession, but if things like time and effort scare you, then it's probably not for you.  There are dedicated, hard-working people who spend their whole lives writing.  They live and die writing.  It is a respectable profession, and assuming that anyone with a little time and a fleeting interest (they said it, not me) can do it well is disrespectful.

There is a notion that art is easy, that art is a trick.  Not hard work or a career path, like real jobs, just throwing something together at the last minute and calling it "art."  Art is, in fact, a stunning amount of work, and time-consuming to boot.  It is not nearly as much fun as the NaNoWriMo website says it is:

We love the fringe benefits accrued to novelists. For one month out of the year, we can stew and storm, and make a huge mess of our apartments and drink lots of coffee at odd hours. And we can do all of these things loudly, in front of people. As satisfying as it is to reach deep within yourself and pull out an unexpectedly passable work of art, it is equally (if not more) satisfying to be able to dramatize the process at social gatherings.

If you're writing to show off how tortured or eccentric you can be, you're probably writing for the wrong reasons, and you'll probably lose interest once you realize the "fringe benefits" don't even come close to outweighing the "time and effort involved." 

If you want to write a novel, write a novel (and hey, November's as good a time as any), but don't imagine that it's easy, or that you'll take to it like a duck to heart surgery.  To quote NaNoWriMo one last time: "Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap."