Na NO MORE Wri Mo
The end of my time participating in NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month, nicknamed NaNoWriMo, is an annual event where writers participate in writing a 50,000 word novel/novella during the month of November. There’s no fee to participate, it’s more of a personal goal and a push for writers to focus on writing something for a month and see what happens. There are a number of authors who have participated in NaNoWriMo and who’s stories have ended up being published such as Erin Morgenstern, Rainbow Rowell, Marissa Meyer, Julie Murphy, and many others.
Despite the stress of it, I’ve enjoyed participating in NaNoWriMo. According to my profile on the website, the first time I participated was in 2011 when I attempted to write a Mystery/Thriller story that I only have vague recollections of. I wrote 23,516 words of it before giving up. I then tried again in 2012 and started a version of a story that I’m still working on, that I’ve given attention and rest to for over ten years now. At that time I only wrote 5,486 words before again giving up. I took a few years off and came back again in 2016 with a different project I’m still thinking about that also looks different from the mere 1,560 words I managed to spit out before giving up. I didn’t start taking it seriously until 2017 where I went over the NaNoWriMo goal with 51,025 words and stayed over the word count every year after.
Participating in NaNoWriMo has forced me to write when I don’t want to, has made me confront my imposter syndrome and get over the fact that the first draft of anything I write won’t be good, but if I don’t get that first draft out then there is literally nothing to improve on. It’s forced me to write down the ideas I’ve had so that I can explore those stories, it’s helped me make a habit of writing and set aside time to write. It’s also helped me experiment with word counts and time writing to see how much I actually can write in a day while accommodating work and daily life. NaNoWriMo also has local writing groups which I’ve participated in1, because writing is a very isolated thing and sometimes it’s nice to be isolated together.
While none of my NaNoWriMo projects have been published2, the month itself has given me a space and time to really focus and work on a story that’s important to me which has been useful. I ended up using a paragraph I wrote for last year’s NaNoWriMo project as the opening of my story “Peach Baby” which ended up winning gritLit’s 2024 writing contest. Even if I thought my project last year was largely crap, some good came out of it.
NaNoWriMo has been something that I always look forward to participating. So it’s hard to say goodbye to it, but also not.
NaNoWriMo has never been a perfect organization. I don’t believe it was ever maliciously run, but I think it was something that became too big with people who didn’t know how to run it. A reddit post by user cenlyra gives some details about some of the past and more recent issues including predatory behaviour of a moderator in one of the teen forums who was not removed for up to five months, of the organization itself soliciting donations from kids, promoting Vanity Presses3, as well as not background checking Municipal Liaisons though these people were around children, and many more things. Another post by user TheNaNoChronicles details other allegations against NaNoWriMo.
The most recent thing however, is that the organization is promoting the use of using AI to participate in NaNoWriMo saying that “to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.” After a lot of backlash the organization has tried to defend their stance. Their website now says that they “neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that leverage AI. We recognize that harm has been done to the writing and creative communities at the hands of bad actors in the generative AI space, and that the ethical questions and risks posed by some aspects of this technology are real. The fact that AI is a large, complex technology category (which encompasses both non-generative and generative AI, applied in a range of ways to a range of uses) contributes to our belief that AI is simply too big and too varied to categorically support or condemn.”
I hate AI. I hate that people use it to write essays instead of learning how to research and write essays for themselves. I hate that literary journals have had an overwhelming number of AI submissions and have to put on their Submission Guidelines that they will not accept AI submissions because the people submitting somehow thing that having ChatGPT spit out a story is equivalent to writing one. I hate that AI is used for art, that it steals artists works and claims it as their own. I hate that there are people who somehow think they are artists and creators when they don’t actually do anything creative by using AI. I hate that there are people delusional enough to think that copy and pasting something to ChatGPT is equivalent to the work of an artist. And I hate that NaNoWriMo is excusing the use of AI by saying that it would be “classist and ableist” not to accept it.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Since NaNoWriMo, an organization about writing and words, seems to be having trouble understanding what the words classist and ableist mean, let’s look at some definitions.
Classist, adjective, treating someone unfairly or having negative opinions about them based on their social class (= economic and social position), especially because they are thought to be from a low social class:
I found the discussion of street clothes and street culture to be racist and classist.
We live in an inherently classist society.
And our next definition:
Ableist, adjective, coming from or having the belief that disabled people (= people who have an illness, injury, or condition that makes it difficult for them to do things that most other people can do) are not as good as people who are not disabled, or that they do not deserve special arrangements that help them to live their lives and be included in society:
The book was criticized for its ableist themes.
As well as:
An ableist society is one that treats non-disabled individuals as the standard of “normal living”.
Or my own examples: it is classist to assume that the only way a person can be a published author is it they have an MFA. It is classist for NaNoWriMo to assume that a less privileged person needs to use AI to be a good writer. It is ableist for NaNoWriMo to assume that a disabled person is not able to write a novel or participate in NaNoWriMo without using AI4.
I don’t want to get into a discussion of whether AI is good or not. I feel like some people will read this and see me as a woman yelling at a cloud or that I’m living in the past. I’ve attended panels on AI and have seen people argue that with any new technology people get scared, that people resist it. We did with television and calculators and computers and now we’re doing it with AI. I know that AI isn’t going anywhere. I know that good things can come from it, like detecting breast cancer early, or being able to accurately diagnose diseases and tumours. I know that like anything AI can be used for good but that we’re using it for bad. People are using AI to get out of learning, to have a program write an essay and assignment instead of putting in the effort themselves, that people are using AI to make deepfakes of celebrities and politicians, to make movies of people and places that don’t exist, to make nude photos and pornographic videos in the likeness of people who do exist.
A now famous tweet by user @space_wizard says: “AI made me believe in a human soul but showing me what art looks like without it.” I think it’s a great way to explain what feels wrong and off-putting about AI regardless of the surreal uncanniness many AI photos and videos appear to be,5 but I doubt space_wizard’s tweet will convince some of the die-hard AI fans to stop using it. People will generally take convenience and something that benefits them personally over anything else, and you can’t convince everyone there is a soul.
Since NaNoWriMo’s defense and promotion of AI, many authors and board members have stepped away from the organization. I know that the NaNoWriMo discord group I was apart of for my city folded after the organization asked Municipal Liaisons to confirm their identity by using a third-party American system. ML’s would be required to submit important government documents and also demanded that ML’s only speak to their groups in English, and put legal responsibility on the volunteer ML’s instead of the NaNoWriMo organization as a whole if something bad happened6. While the organizations stance on AI is the reason I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo anymore it’s clear that things have not been going well with them for some time. Their beliefs on AI may have just been the straw that broke the camels already bad back.
I don’t know what I’ll do this November, if anything. I’ll still be writing but it won’t be with the same fervour with which I participated in NaNoWriMo. I’d like to do a rogue one if possible. I’ve seen many people online correctly say that you don’t need to be on the site to participate, that one could still work on a project without being connected to the organization so maybe I’ll do that. Or I’d like to a join a writing group, which can also be very hard to find. I’m kind of at a loss right now. It’s become a habit, participating in NaNoWriMo regularly from 2016-2023, and now it’s one that I’m breaking. But I can’t support an organization that prides itself in creation and then promotes AI and idiotically claims that it would be classist and ableist not to. I can’t support an organization that clearly never believed in the writers who made it the great thing it once was, who sold their soul to appeal to the AI masses, who would rather get an increase in users7 “writing” a story using ChatGPT then respect the integrity of art as whole.
So if you have room in your writing group, message me I guess. Unless you love AI, then count me out.
Though I’ve never been a huge fan for how they were run.
Yet.
DON’T GO TO VANITY PRESSES!
I can’t find the post but somewhere on this Reddit post a user commented that they are a disabled writer and while they weren’t able to meet the daily writing goals due to their disability they still participated and accommodated themselves by lowering the word count. Because it really is that simple to accommodate for disabled people and for them to achieve what an able-bodied person can with proper accommodations.
Here’s looking at you weirdly shaped hands.
And possibly donations…