NaNoWriMo loses the plot

Well it’s come to this, National Novel Writing Month has been enshittified. The whole organisation had been a bit dodgy for a few years, but they’ve finally fully lost the plot with a bizarre defence of the use of A.I. tools, claiming that to decry the use of A.I. in writing is “classist and ableist.” Despite the very real issue of large language models being trained on the work of authors who never gave consent for that. Despite the threat generative A.I. poses to writers, especially freelancers. In what I’m sure is an entirely unrelated matter, they currently have a sponsorship deal with a company, ProWritingAid, that sells A.I. tools to writers. Various writers have stepped down from the board of the non-profit and lots of writers are deleting their NaNoWriMo accounts from the website.

There are plenty of articles if you want to get into the weeds about it. 

NaNoWriMo is in disarray -The Verge

NaNoWriMo Shits the Bed on Artificial Intelligence - Chuck Wendig

NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’ - Pivot to A.I.

NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose - Wired

My History with NaNoWriMo

I first did NaNoWriMo in 2006, to write my first original novel, Shoot the Humans First. (I’d done a couple of novel length fanfics by then.) And although I haven’t done it every single year since, between the main November event and the April and July Camp events, I’ve done a NaNoWriMo event 21 times.

To give you an idea of how long that really is, let me just say, I wrote quite a lot of my 2006 book on a Palm Pilot, using a portable infrared keyboard. (Yes, I said infrared.) By the next year I had a netbook. La di da! Of course I’ve also used various PCs and laptops, and right now, my tools are a Chromebook and a tablet and folding Bluetooth keyboard, which is sort of circling back to my roots with that PalmPilot!

I’ve sold 13 of the stories first drafted in a NaNo event to publishers and self-published three others. A couple of others are still in stages of being worked on. Only once did I write a fanfic, which is up on my fanfic site.

So it’s been a really important part of my writing life. I am, shall we say, a wee bit competitive, so the deadline and friendly competition aspect was always a great motivation for me. And it was always a good way to do a sort of writing reset, and just get out of my own way and focus hard on writing for a month and re-establish habits that had maybe started to slip. I encouraged others to do the event. I used to participate on the forums quite a lot. I considered the event a generally good thing. And really, I still do. The event that is, not so much the organisation that runs the official site these days.

But all good things come to an end. I’m one of the writers who has deleted my account. Hilariously, the page you see after the deletion hasn’t apparently been run through even that most basic of A.I. tools, a spellcheck.

So what now?

I wasn’t actually planning on doing the event this November. The next draft I’m planning is probably only going to be about 40,000 words, and the timing wasn’t quite right for when I wanted to start writing it anyway. But now lots of people are organising alternative events, some of them with the same parameters, some not, so I will likely take part in one of those, to show support and to get back to the core of the idea of NaNoWriMo the event, which has been lost along the way by NaNoWriMo organisation. Which I think has become more about writing as a product, than about writing as personal expression.

The one I will likely be doing is Writing Month, which is being organised by a Fedizen, since I’m active on the Fediverse through Mastodon these days.

But there are others. Here’s a thread compiling alternatives you might want to check out.

NaNoWriMo alternatives

The NaNoWriMo subreddit is also discussing the whole thing, obviously, and alternative events may be found there.