As much as I love NaNoWrimo, and give it full credit for genittg me off my fiction-writing butt, there are things that Chris Baty says that I think are full of it. Like your opening quote. It's good that he's light hearted about writing, and sometimes funny, but I haven't read No Plot, No Problem, but I've seen a lot of quotes from it, and some of them do more than just get people to stop worrying about the quality of their first draft. They tend to give the impression that quality just isn't important. And that particular quote seems to equate quality with dryness the kind of thing you read only because it's supposed to be good for you. But one person's dry-as-unbuttered-toast book is another person's intense pleasure. I can almost guarantee that Chris would label, let's say, War and Peace, as the driest of the dry. I've read it three times over the years, and consider it anything but dry. Ditto for a lot of books that today's generation of writers have probably never even heard of, much less read. There's a lot of territory in between dry, however you define it, and fluff. Fluff may be fun, and everybody needs some fun, but it isn't very nourishing. What Chris seems to be saying is that anything that's nourishing is difficult to swallow. And because of that, the bar he sets is going to stay low, not just for beginning writers, but for some who are into their second and third books and should be learning their craft instead of staying at their original level of accomplishment.