NanoWrimo, Because Writing Good Is Overrated!
I always hated NanoWrimo. I hated it when I was studying Creative Writing in 2014. I hated it when it convinced a classmate that for books, quantity is more important than quality. And I hate it now ten years later. NanoWrimo is an activity that pushes writers toward set wordcount goals, and creates a sense of community by bringing these writers together in pursuit of the wordcount. It never did signify creativity to me, it signified a sort of forced fun you’ll only understand my thin references to if you also had one weirdly narcissistic parent who filmed every single event in your life, but whose recordings of those events were so uncomfortably fake that years later you can pore through them and think “I don’t remember being happy that day, why am I smiling?”
NanoWrimo is churnalism for aspiring authors. It pushes them to set wordcount goals and to feel bad about not reaching them, disregarding the lifestyles and writing speeds of individuals.
Remembering NanoWrimo is like remembering an uncomfortable silence when you found out that the writer your friends all looked up to was an abusive creep. I’d name-drop one here, but by the time you read this, there will probably be another one whose name also sounds like a type of crocodile and whose chances of attacking a woman are also roughly equal to the crocodile.
Never mind the bear, you should side with the crocs.
Anyway, NanoWrimo is a sort of perfunctory, organized fun by which many aspiring teenage writers with ADHD and other brain things sign themselves up to be psychologically tortured by the dim revelation that putting together an entire universe for a science fiction series actually takes a bit longer than just whacking out a billionaire pirate werewolf romance reverse harem with aliens with two dicks in it (which, by the way, is such a niche category of literature that you’re probably a bestseller in it, even if you’ve never written a book).
This dim realization hits you in the back of the head. You will see other writers, in genres you can write faster, writing those genres faster. This doesn’t mean your genre is better or fancier, it just means they’re different, but without knowing this (which many new writers don’t) you can quite easily trick yourself into being miserable.
Those teenage writers push themselves to write so many hundreds or thousands of words a day. On paper, this isn’t an awful exercise, and I do find it fascinating that a company has erected itself from the premise of simply asking the denizens of Tumblr to type more sad poetry on their computers (and not merely erected itself whilst looking at those teenage denizens (allegedly). I imagine NanoWrimo alone is responsible for the replacement keyboard industry remaining afloat, and perhaps for the traumatizingly dark poetry that is now popular on TikTok.
Anyway. The purpose of NanoWrimo was fairly noble in the beginning: Get writers to write something. But now, the mask has slipped.
Unfortunately, NanoWrimo never actually cared about the writing. It was about the illusion of writing, which I pointed out way back in 2014 on a blog I can’t find anymore. So here’s something from someone else.
“Nano had given me a false sense of ability and identity. I was not a writer or a storyteller, I was a typist. I could type 50k words of crap out onto a page. Big whoop!”
NanoWrimo was always about pushing writers into these anxiety-inducing spirals of word-debt, where one difficult Tuesday could put you 1000, 2000, or 3000 words behind your goal. It was a high-stress relationship that aspiring writers willingly got back into every year, like having Stockholm syndrome for that one ex you only see at Christmas who tells you that your music is shit.
Sure, the grooming allegations in 2022 and 2023 caused a mass exodus from the ‘community’ but many people stayed, arguing that as a whole, NanoWrimo was so huge now that some pockets of goodness remained, like when that aforementioned ex buys you flowers between bouts of verbal abuse.
But I think it is over now.
Now, they have embraced true churnalism.
No longer does a typist need to cosplay as a writer. No longer does a depressed Fantasy author need to bully themselves into self-hatred by staring at the words they haven’t written, ignoring the words swilling around in the ocean of their mind. No longer do these participants need to force themselves to hyper-focus on one particular book (note, I am currently writing fifteen simultaneously). No, writers are free now.
But a bit too free. Free from effort. Free, in fact, from that difficult thing called writing. NanoWrimo, in a recent statement, has said that “The categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.”
Allow me to respond honestly. What a bunch of drooling, backward pricks they are.
I find it hilariously ironic because saying 'rejecting AI is ableist' is actually ableist in itself. It implies the average AI masturbator thinks that disabled people can only ever pretend to write, pretend to dream, through the proxy of the vomit machine.
That disabled artists and writers are in some way, lesser. It is a hideous belief to hold. And it cuts right through the central lie of NanoWrimo to their rotten putrid soul.
An AI writer is a real writer in the same way their girlfriend's unconvincing orgasm is a real orgasm. I'm tired honey, let's write another article tomorrow.
Goodnight Nano.
Phillip Carter is an award-winning comedian, author, and poet from Manchester, UK. He has performed at the Manchester Fringe, Bright Club, and a handful of radio shows. His work mixes Science Fiction with dark comedy, creating twisting and poetic stories which defy genres and keep audiences guessing until the final ridiculous punchline. You can find his books, his podcast, his shirt store, his everything at linktr.ee/phillipcarter
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Well I’d just say that if you want to be a writer who connects with a broad audience, it might help to do a little intro instead of just assuming everyone knows what you’re talking about. What is NanoWrimo? I had no idea when I began to read this and only a vague idea when I finished. But the conclusion does make sense: writing a bunch of words down does not equal communication. Ever go to a library and pick out random books, just for fun? There are thousands and thousands that are just not worth the time to read. Don’t count your words, make your words count.
It's hard to see it now, at this end of the arc of history, but there was actually a time when NaNoWriMo was good. It was the late 2000s and early 2010s; when white males still believed they'd be allowed to join the great fraternity of "men of letters," and when some of us still thought if we could write a great novel, there would be people out there who were interested in reading it. NaNoWriMo was an introduction for many dreamers, to what the hard work of writing a novel would really be like; and for some that succeeded, it provided the self-belief that they were in fact capable of it.
We didn't know, at that time, what the arts were becoming, and what the publishing industry was turning into; and so at that time NaNoWriMo brought a number of naive believers together to try their best to create original work, based on original ideas. Unfortunately, I was present for most aspects of the fall of this structure. It is indeed true that in the last years, you would meet almost nothing but fanfiction and erotica writers; you would meet people who believed the very idea of pushing oneself to exceed what you thought you were capable of, was not sufficiently considerate of neurodivergents, different ways of thinking and knowing, etc. It's terrible now, but at one time, NaNoWriMo did represent something we didn't have elsewhere, and which might be impossible to build again in the world as it became.