Nanowrimo
The good vision and the bad vision
It’s the start of November. For years, this was the starting line for myriads of eager amateur writers sweating to put words on paper in National Novel Writers’ Month (Nanowrimo). If they keep writing 1,667 words (on average) every day, by the end of the month, they would’ve finished their novels - or, at least, brought them to the 50,000-word mark.
I did Nanowrimo twice myself. It was fun, in the way running a marathon is fun: it sometimes didn’t feel fun in the moment, but looking back, I feel it stretched me in a good way and I’m glad about it. It gave me something I needed at that point in my life as a writer.
But I haven’t gone back to it since. And I haven’t ever completed either novel since I dropped them at the 50,000-word mark. I feel Nanowrimo was a good race, but it was missing a number of important things.
Earlier this year, I saw Nanowrimo the organization dissolved after several scandals. I didn’t really mourn.
The other week, I picked up a book by the founder of Nanowrimo, Chris Baty: No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. It brought back some conflicted memories for me.
Baty’s book is, essentially, a book form of the same articles I remember reading on the Nanowrimo website. The website’s down now that the organization’s gone, so I’ll be using the book as the concentrated essence of Nanowrimo which it does read like. Mainly, it’s a pep talk on focus and persistence to keep writing. He exhorts you to make a written promise to yourself at the beginning of the month, go through a ritual to “turn off your inner editor” and just get a bad first draft down, talk to your friends in advance and say you’ll be more available to them after the month of noveling, establish a dedicated space for writing so you’ll be more motivated to write once you’re there, and much more.
In itself, I’m nodding along with all of that. I’ve done things like it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to any first-time writer, but for someone embarking on a challenge anything like Nanowrimo, it’s good. I didn’t do all of it; I wish I’d done more. When I started pushing myself to write more consistently (after I started this blog), I used some of those same mental strategies. It’s all definitely important. It’s not talking about writing a good story, but it’s talking about actually writing. And you can’t write a good story without writing.
But it’s not everything.
I remember hearing somewhere from a publishing-house intern how, every December, they’d be swamped with tons of unsolicited 50,000-word novels fresh out of Nanowrimo.
Most of them were, of course, bad. Viewed charitably, they’re first drafts. Viewed less charitably, they’re first drafts from first-time writers. I look back on my childhood early drafts and groan. My characters were wooden, the plots were ill-planned, motivations were unintelligible to any reader who wasn’t me, and worse. I was biting off much more than I could chew. I was nowhere near ready for publication, and the first-time Nanowrimo winner is in the same boat.
Worse, you often don’t see that at the time. I see it now, but back then, I didn’t. That’s why people tell you to set your first draft aside for a while and come back to revise it with fresh eyes. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to make yourself able to take a fresh look at your own novel than a short story or nonfiction essay, since it’s longer and more a matter of art than simple communication.
So, Nanowrimo winners will mostly be at a loss here. Experienced writers, like I was at the time, will at least see their draft isn’t quite ready yet and needs some revision. But people who’ve never tried writing before, and who’ve actually finished a somewhat-coherent narrative (I knew I’d skipped over a lot of chapters), probably won’t.
Granted, Baty doesn’t tell anyone to send their freshly-written novel right off to a publisher. He’s got a chapter on revising, with some decent if limited advice. The Nanowrimo website mentioned it too. But, he also talks up “being seen by those around you in the new, vastly sexier light of your novelist status” immediately upon completing the 50,000 words. He urges you to call it “my most recent novel,” without mentioning it’s also your only novel.
All this is said with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, of course, but only a bit - it’s the same tone he uses elsewhere when suggesting you can absolutely write your novel in downtime at work as long as nobody sees you. So, I’m not surprised some people take it seriously, call themselves novelists, and forget the need to rewrite.
Nanowrimo talked up published novels that were written during that month. One example they trumpeted was Wool, by Hugh Howey, which I’ve read and enjoyed. He wrote the first novelette earlier that year, and then during Nanowrimo he expanded it with 60,000 words more to make the “Wool Omnibus” which he quickly published at the end of the month. “The festival of carpal tunnel that is NaNoWriMo has been the greatest thing to happen to me as a writer,” he says.
But, Howey was already a published author then. He knew how to write. He knew how to make good characters and plot an interesting story. I didn’t see him using any of Baty’s advice on getting unstuck - nobody randomly dies or goes off on a road trip or starts up verbose habits of speech to swell word count.
It’s the same way for most, if not all, of the other published novels that were advertised as coming from Nanowrimo. Nanowrimo is great motivation to write, but you can’t send your first draft off to a publisher. To come out with something publishable, you need to know or learn how to write well.
You couldn’t really learn to write well from the Nanowrimo forums, or from Baty’s book. Some of his advice to struggling writers in the middle of Nanowrimo is good, like listening to people around you for turns of phrase that’d go well in your prose. But a lot of it is more clumsy.
He talks up dream sequences, dropping in loose ends with no idea how they’ll fit, randomly killing one apex of a love triangle, and more - just to spark up your novel, to get you writing more.
This’s the sort of thing I could praise as prompts in a writing class. They seize your interest as a writer; they get you writing. They could be the premise of a story, or a story could be designed to have one or two of them in its middle. (I remember fondly how Un Lun Dun shoved the apparent-protagonist back home a quarter of the way through, to follow someone we’d thought was a secondary character.) But, things need to be designed around them rather than their simply being shoved in. A story isn’t a sequence of random interesting events; it has shape and structure.
In other words, this’s advice for writing something. It’s not advice for writing a good novel. When I read Baty’s book, I recognized it - I’d seen the same sort of thing so often on the Nanowrimo forums, and I’d seen so many people saying they’d taken it. I pity the publishing intern who had to see so many Nanowrimo novels in December.
I’m told that, toward the end of Nanowrimo’s life, it was completely open to writers copy-pasting text from LLM’s like ChatGPT. I’m not surprised. That’s completely in tune with their message of getting words on paper by whatever means you want. But I’ve heard that was one of the things that killed Nanowrimo the organization. In the end, even the amateur writers who followed the rest of Baty’s advice wanted a higher vision than that.
The first year I took part in Nanowrimo, I’d already written a fair amount - including a draft of the first volume of my projected fantasy trilogy, several plays for my mom’s Sunday school class, and more. I started the month with some characters and an outline for a portal-fantasy epic.
I knew enough then to avoid Nanowrimo’s bad advice. I think my writing stayed pretty organized. I knew what my characters were doing, and if I skipped around in my outline, I kept it consistent. But, the story kept growing. I hit the 50,000 word mark on November 30th, but my story was only half complete at most. I’m still proud of what I wrote that month, and some of the scenes. I’ve never gone back to the story, but I think I could.
The second year I seriously tried Nanowrimo, I came in with a shorter outline - but it hid fundamental flaws with the plot and pacing. I don’t remember whether I wrote 50,000 words that month, but once again, I didn’t come out of it with a complete story. I tried again on that story later, but I realized the outline would need fundamental reworking to make something I’d be happy with.
All in all, I’m not sorry Nanowrimo the organization is dead.
Nanowrimo did some good, but it promised too much and pushed people to practice bad storytelling habits if they didn’t know enough to find good storytelling habits on their own. Getting people to write is good; enticing them to think it’s a novel is not good.
Nanowrimo will live on, I’m sure, as an idea: a challenge passed through the internet to write steadily for thirty days. That’s the good part. People interested in writing will find that, and take the challenge during some month that works for them, and add in good writing advice from somewhere, and hopefully write something. It probably won’t be a complete novel, but it’ll be something written.
With the organization dead, the good parts can live. I might well take up Nanowrimo again myself - without the bad writing advice, but with the impetus to write.