NaNoWriMo Is Dead. What Now?

Hey friends! Welcome back to the Loose Leaf List. If you’re at all interested in writing, chances are you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo — short for National Novel Writing Month. Basically, it’s a yearly challenge where writers attempt to write an entire novel (50,000 words) in the month of November.

I should make a distinction here between NaNoWriMo the idea and NaNoWriMo the organization. While many writers take on NaNoWriMo each year without going through the organization at all, the main body coordinating and promoting NaNoWriMo is actually an official nonprofit.

NaNoWriMo offers participating writers online tools to track their progress, forums and regional groups to connect with other writers, and a special winner’s page with sponsor offers if you “win” your challenge. They’ve been around for so long that the challenge has become synonymous with the organization.

In 2022, 413,295 writers took the challenge through the NaNoWriMo organization. But this year, writers are abandoning them in droves.

What Killed NaNoWriMo

A lot of people decided to ditch NaNoWriMo this year due to a statement released by the organization on September 2nd about their stance on generative AI. In this statement, they refused to take a stance on the ethics of using generative AI for writing a creative project, and stated that condemning such use is actually ableist and classist (the statement has since been revised due to backlash, but you can read the original version here).

Many in the writing community take a hard stance against generative AI. Aside from the philosophical question of whether it counts as art if you get an AI to do it for you, it has been proven that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT were trained on hundreds of thousands of pirated books. Not only does text-to-text generative AI claim to replace the craft of writing, but it steals the work of human authors to do it.

(To be clear: AI in general encompasses a huge variety of tools and techniques, many of which have beneficial uses. The arguments I’m presenting here are specifically against the use of text-to-text generative AI for the purposes of creative writing.)

So it’s no surprise that NaNoWriMo’s statement caused an uproar — not least among low-income and disabled writers, who resented the implication that they need a computer to write their stories for them. NaNoWriMo did eventually try to walk its statement back a little by deleting the stuff about ableism and classism, but the damage was done.

It did not escape writers’ notice that one of NaNoWriMo’s sponsors this year is ProWritingAid, a piece of software that has an AI writing feature. This led to some speculation that NaNoWriMo released their statement as a way of covertly promoting their sponsor, though I haven’t seen solid proof of this.

If you’re interested on reading more about generative AI for creative writing, I wrote a post last February about whether AI will steal jobs from human fiction authors.

NaNoWriMo’s Long List of Crimes

But the AI statement was only the tip of the iceberg. The renewed scrutiny of NaNoWriMo amplified another controversy that happened with the organization last year: allegedly, someone joined the NaNoWriMo team and proceeded to send inappropriate messages to children on one of the forums designated for young writers. The way NaNoWriMo handled the situation afterwards drew strong criticism.

For myself, the AI thing left a bad taste in my mouth, but learning about the child safety situation is what made me rule out ever supporting NaNo as an organization — unless they completely replace the entire leadership team and get some actual robust policies in place that are proven to work over time.

If you want a comprehensive look at everything that went down with NaNoWriMo, including shady sponsor deals, bad management, and atrocious treatment of some of their volunteers, check out this video from Savy Writes Books on YouTube. Not only does it go into things in more detail than I ever could here, but it also features interviews with several former NaNo volunteers and participants, plus a writer and disability advocate who has Thoughts about the whole being-against-generative-AI-is-ableist thing.

So What Now?

I really feel for everyone who found a community through the NaNoWriMo organization, only for the organization to let them down. If you’re one of those people: I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this.

I’ve never fully participated in NaNoWriMo, but I was really looking forward to taking on the challenge someday. This year could have been that year — I have a lot more time to write now that I’m not in college or hustling during an internship (I work full time, but my hours are very regular).

Alas, everything I’ve discovered about the organization has left such a horrid taste in my mouth that I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s possible that one day, the stink of the organization will wear off of the idea, and people can once again enjoy the NaNoWriMo challenge without thinking of the organization when they do. But for me personally, that is not this day.

Instead, I set myself a challenge this October: Write 1,000 words of my science fiction thriller manuscript every day. Slightly less ambitious than a traditional NaNo, where you need to hit 1,667 words per day for a total of 50,000 at the end — but hey, I do have a life outside of writing. And I’ve been hitting my goal so far! Woo-hoo! Tune in next month to see how I did.

For those interested in a community, I have seen a few other communal writing challenges popping up. Perhaps one of those will take off and fill the space that NaNoWriMo left. One thing I am certain of: Writers will always find a way to write, with or without an official challenge.

Do you enjoy writing challenges? Share in the comments!

What I Read This Month

If you read last month’s newsletter, you know I absolutely fell in love with An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. Well, here’s how that’s going for me …

The Ember Quartet by Sabaa Tahir

So yeah, I blew through the entire rest of the Ember quartet this month — A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm. I laughed, I sobbed, I had my heart ripped out of my chest. The complex characters, rich world, and breakneck pace cemented this as one of my favorite fantasy series EVER. Seriously, if you’re a fantasy fan (especially YA fantasy) and you haven’t read this yet, what are you even doing??

And now I’m ready to get my heart stomped on all over again with the spinoff novel, Heir, which came out on October 1st! Hooray!!

In Case You Missed It …

In which I round up my favorite fun posts that I made this past month!

This month’s YouTube video was a deep dive into one of the most polarizing characters in Doctor Who: Clara Oswald. I tracked her development throughout the show, and attempted to answer the question of why some people hate her and some people love her. (As for my own opinion … it’s complicated!)

On Instagram and TikTok, I showed off some of the special embellishments on the books in my collection, and rated them based on how cool I think they look:

For the Whovians over on TikTok, I debunked some common Doctor Who behind-the-scenes myths (turns out, a lot of people like spreading rumors that important scenes were entirely improvised?):

On Instagram, I got a little vulnerable about how it feels to have to shelve a writing project:

And finally, on Instagram and TikTok, I shared whether three sci-fi technologies might actually be possible in real life:

And a sneak peek of next month …

On October 2nd, I had the privilege of hosting an Instagram live where I interviewed Jill Tew, the author of the YA dystopian romance book The Dividing Sky (releasing October 8th)! Excitingly, I will be using clips of this interview in my YouTube video for next month, in which I will explore the rise and fall of the YA dystopian genre, and how it might just be making a comeback.

You can watch my full conversation with Jill here:

Thank you so much for reading! Until next time, bookish friends.

Love,

Ellie