Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21
By Cat Barbour ’24
Staff Writer
Both hated and revered by participants, National Novel Writing Month, known colloquially as NaNoWriMo, has drawn the attention of writers since 1999, including hundreds of thousands since 2007. In 2006, NaNoWriMo became a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring people to tell their stories. According to their mission statement, NaNoWriMo “believes in the transformational power of creativity.” The statement continues, “We provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds — on and off the page.”
The challenge: Write 50,000 words in 30 days. Or, in the words of NaNoWriMo headquarters: “Your job now is not to create a manuscript that a publisher will want to sell at lemonade stands all over the country. That comes later, once you've done a ton of revision and rethinking. For now, your task is to create a first draft. Or in other words, to make a glorious, beautiful, breathtaking mess.”
Emily Carle ’21, Mia Kerchen ’24 and Fiona Milton ’22 each discussed their participation in NaNoWriMo with the Mount Holyoke News.
Carle, while not currently participating, did so as a first-year in 2017 and was a part of the Western Massachusetts and Five College NaNoWriMo groups. She appreciated being a part of the groups and said that the motivation helped her complete 30,000 words. “With the Five College group, everyone else was a college student and so they were also dealing with … trying to take classes and write [for NaNoWriMo] and actually write for grades,” Carle said, adding, “They were truly a good support system for when I wanted to give up.”
For the past three years, Kerchen has also been writing. While she has never completed the challenge, she’s been having a lot of fun writing stories. She commented that NaNoWriMo is “really intense” and compared it to “writing a small paper every day.”
Milton did finish the 50,000-word goal on her first attempt. She has participated in NaNoWriMo four times: in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2017. She believes that “it is not about winning or writing 50K words, it is about starting to tell a story you’ve been wanting to tell.” She added, “NaNoWriMo is about writing for yourself and no one else, so don’t let anyone tell you how many words you have to write to do it right.”
Fans of NaNoWriMo are loud and proud, but so are its critics. Notably, blogs on both sides of the argument are a few years old. The dust seems to have settled, but for a while, peace was not an option.
Chris Becheen, an active comical blogger, reluctantly shared his opinion on NaNoWriMo in 2016 in his post, “Nanowrimo: The Good, The Bad, And the Very Very Ugly.” In the post, he detailed his issues with the program, arguing that 50,000 words would be generously considered a novella, that participating in the competition does not make one a novelist and that the program’s idea that word count above all else matters is problematic. Additionally, he warned, “Dec 1st, the predators come out to play. They promise the moon, … preying on people’s desire to BE writers and sucking off their hard-earned money by pretending that these manuscripts don’t need anything more than a copy edit to knock the socks off a publisher.”
NaNoWriMo also warns participants about “literary scammers.” The Terms and Conditions page reads, “If you are approached by someone wielding a too-good-to-be-true deal, please let us know, and we'll investigate.”
In line with some of Becheen’s views, even the NaNoWriMo website reminds participants that their books will be works in progress at the end of the month, stating that “The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days: not 50,000 perfect words, not even 50,000 readable words. Fifty thousand words of practicing your voice.”
In 2010, Laura Miller, journalist and author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia,” had similar issues with the competition. She believes that the competition leaves out an important part of the writing process: reading. A common piece of advice for aspiring writers is to read and learn from those who are more experienced. With the grueling pace of the competition, combined with the hectic month it takes place in, there isn’t any time to read, Miller said.
NaNoWriMo does provide some tools and support, such as writing seminars and NaNo Prep 101 to help flesh out pieces, and most participants realize that they can’t write a single draft and publish it immediately — as Carle said, “I know that publishing does not work that way.”
Whether you love NaNoWriMo or despise it, the program will not stop anytime soon. The number of writers it annually attracts only grows. Starting with just 21 participants in 1999, the challenge saw 455,080 people write over 2 million words in 2019. While not every submission will turn out like “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen, many participate to do exactly what Milton recommends: write to tell the story they’ve always wanted to tell.
