AI Is Coming for the Amateur Novelists. That’s Fine.
5 min read
With a name that sounds like something a parent would slowly mouth to their infant, NaNoWriMo is an annual “challenge” in which many thousands of seemingly well-adjusted people decide to write a novel in a month. “Do I need something special to write a novel?” the nonprofit that puts on this exquisite torture reasonably asks on its website. “Nope!”
National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 with 21 participants, and now nearly half a million take part every November. The event is also the name of the organization that gamifies the exercise, hosting participants on its online platform. To “win” NaNoWriMo, you need to produce a minimum of 50,000 words in a month (about the length of The Great Gatsby)—or 1,667 words a day, a number, NaNoWriMo tells us, that “scientists have determined to be the perfect amount to boost your creativity.”
NaNoWriMo first emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has Silicon Valley’s fingerprints all over it; if you’ve ever thought that producing fiction could be optimized, this is like the Soylent of novel writing. The organization boasts that its platform “tracks words for writers like Fitbit tracks steps.” But as long as it involved humans actually sitting down and sweating out sentences, it all seemed pretty harmless to someone like me, a curmudgeon who thinks writing is just hard work and not for everyone. But on Monday, NaNoWriMo expressed its thoughts on the use of AI, and it turns out that being a human is no longer even a requirement.
And now I think I know where NaNoWriMo is headed, and I approve: Just let the robots do it.
In a statement that seemed like it may have been written by AI, the organization refused to “explicitly support” or “explicitly condemn” the use of technological assistance. And in case you thought to object, NaNoWriMo argued that disavowing AI would have exacerbated “classist and ableist issues.” The classism argument had to do with the fact that “a level of privilege” might endow some writers with “the financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review.” The ableism charge was even more absurd. AI should be allowed to help you write your novel because “not all brains have same [sic] abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing.”
Well, yes. That’s why writing takes work. If I entered a contest to see if I could fix a broken washing machine, my lack of education and proficiency as a plumber would make that difficult and most likely impossible. Allow me to access YouTube videos of plumbing tutorials or use a robot plumber (if we ever get those), and the task will be much, much easier. Fixing your washing machine and writing a novel are, of course, two different kinds of accomplishments; doing your own plumbing will save you a few hundred dollars and might provide a sense of satisfaction, while the novel will just make you feel good about yourself. Plumbers have a useful skill that demands expertise acquired through training and much trial and error, whereas, according to NaNoWriMo, its participants “enter the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stay-at-home parents. They leave novelists.” This is why I’ve never liked NaNoWriMo.
A lot of people online were angry about the organization’s decision, and a few authors stepped down from its writers’ board. AI is not popular among creative people, even part-time creative people, given that large language models have cannibalized the work of published authors and threaten to further erode the value of creativity. Many of the critics mentioned AI’s penchant for “stealing” writing. A number of disabled writers in particular took offense at the idea that they should need AI. Laura Elliot, an author whose debut novel will be out next spring, wrote on X that “disabled writers do not need the immoral theft machine to write because we lack the ability to be creative without plagiarism—encouraging AI is a slap in the face to all writers and this excuse is appallingly ableist.”
I’m sympathetic to these writers who feel betrayed by a writing project that was apparently a helpful motivator for them. But if varying levels of “education and proficiency” divide those who can succeed at the challenge from those who can’t, maybe everyone should just take another month. Personally speaking, writing is difficult even when it’s rewarding, even after I’ve spent a decades-long career doing it. You gain confidence over time, but it’s always a struggle to make what ends up on the page correspond with what was in your mind. That struggle—the million individual choices that writing demands—is what gives it its particular human flavor. (And maybe it’s sacrilege to say this, but consider, too, that not everyone was born to be an author or needs to try to become one.)
Which is why I, for one, think that NaNoWriMo’s statement is great news. The world needs fewer novels, certainly fewer novels that have been written in a month. And artificial intelligence is itchy for distractions; we need to give the robots something to do before they start messing with nuclear codes or Social Security numbers. Just give NaNoWriMo to them. They can probably produce 50,000 words in a few seconds. Better yet, they can also read the novels that other AIs produce, saving everyone from a lot of bad writing. Reading metric tons of material in order to reconstitute it as original work is, after all, what they do best. When the AIs have spent years developing their abilities—writing and shelving novel after novel—then maybe they will have something to contribute to our human efforts.
Until then, if you want to write, just write, though don’t assume it will be good. And don’t assume it will be quick. When all we have is our human brains, we need to deliberate on every word. Maybe that’s why NaNoWriMo has had such appeal, precisely in a time of prediction software: People want the challenge of doing something that requires patience and persistence and imagination, and that spits out unpredictable results. Take that away, and you might as well just be fiddling with your Fitbit.
