The Rise and Fall of NaNoWriMo
How a press release with an AI statement is the beginning of the end of the end for a 25-year organization
Really, the story of how National Novel Writing Month came to be provides much foreshadowing into the way it’s crumbling now. In 1999, the idea was posed by a group — all men, as I remember it, although I can’t find a source that states it outright anymore — of college students: let’s write 50,000 words in November.
The reasons were arbitrary: Of Mice and Men was nearby and had 50,000 words in it, November had 30 days, which is easy enough to divide and felt like a good timeline as a habit-starter, and the founder Chris Baty even joked he wanted to tell potential dates he was a novelist. (The link to the joke from this 2015 HuffPost article leads to a 404; NaNo has done a lot of scrubbing their past recently.)
Since then, Baty has written and published two books, both of them nonfiction, and both related to NaNo itself. One, Ready, Set, Novel, is a workbook that Baty’s own website declares “the greatest novel-prep workbook in history.”
The second is called No Plot? No Problem, although in looking it up just now I found an e-book edition was published in 2004, before the revised and updated (and available in print) option came out a decade…
