I love NaNoWriMo and have written and won every year since 2019. My only issue is once the month is complete, no one cares about your novel or that you finished it.
So when I got laid off earlier in the year I started working on an alternative to NaNo.
- Author profiles w/ blogging
- Publication cataloging + reader reviews
- WIP cataloging with word count tracking
- A community feed similar to Goodreads + WIP word count updates
The idea is I think NaNo could be more social post-November. With Pen Pinery's current MVP I think Authors can build a readership fanbase much easier than anything NaNo could do.
In the future I want to also have goal tracking based on pages instead of word count and for editing as well. I also think there's a lot of potential for building out an ARC sign up system.
Pretty much I've self-published 15+ books and I'm putting everything that worked for me into a social author/reading platform.
Authors who use NaNo or are completely against it, I'd love to get some feedback on the concept from a description standpoint. Any thoughts or tips?
---
Since this is YC, the tech stack is Django 4, Postgres and Bootstrap 5; Hosted on DigitalOcean.
So as a reader the only way to see any content is to purchase a book?
i love self-published books and back a few authors on patreon that i've found on royalroad, but there's not a chance i'd be buying books from unkown self-published authors without even a few sample chapters. especially not when the pitch is that it's something an author has created by churning out as much wordcount as possible during a writing challenge.
Very cool idea; I always wished the NaNoWriMo energy would persist past November. That's actually why I added forums to my own writing site and have had _decent_ luck keeping the momentum going year-round (at least, some years).
If you end up adding an API or looking for other sites to partner with, feel free to reach out sometime (email on profile). Not sure what your needs are but I might be able to help from Notebook.ai. :)
you say you're in MVP, so it may be a bit early for this but, it's really surprising to me that the landing page is not geared towards readers trying to discover new authors.
I'm glad that NaNoWriMo continues to work for people, but I think it's important to note that it doesn't work for everyone - and it's ok if it doesn't work for you.
I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a decade and a half ago, and not only failed to complete anything, but was also driven into a worse depression because of it. I had to avoid people talking about it in November for years afterwards or I'd start to relapse, too.
It being November is especially hard on US people with any kids or large active families, dealing with big Thanksgiving plans.
No matter how well you plan, you really only get two meaningful weeks before the wall hits you. "Just set a reasonable word count to hit every day!" Then each day you miss days because your side dish plans went sideways or your flights get rescheduled, making the goal steeper every other day.
"Use your travel time to write more!" Almost impossible with young kids without sticking a spouse or relative with watching them, and the resentment of even asking if you can ignore kids to write lasts a hell of a lot longer than November.
"You can catch up after Thanksgiving!" Not after anti-vax Aunt J gives your family the gift of some great new viral disease that hits in the last week.
There are writing sprints in other months that never seem to have the community of NaNo, and all your single or childless writer friends burn it all out during NaNo. The community is a big part of what makes it fun, otherwise it's just an arbitrary chore goal.
Writing this much seems to take significant mental energy, so if you are already prone to depression you need to be extremely prepared. It's also true depending on your intentions for all creative things, particularly if you have low self confidence. For example you might feel bad about yourself because you don't do enough art so you enter some kind of art competition, but then you immediately feel shitty about yourself and so you can't bring yourself to do it, leading to even worse self confidence about it.
My therapist told me that in Germany there is an idiom that in English translates to "if you want to prove that you will fail you will always succeed". If I did NaNoWriMo, I would have the full expectation that I will fail, even if I try to tell myself that I have hope it would go well, and so I will just naturally make myself fail.
While I empathize with your situation-- be careful not to discourage others. The only two fully completed novellas were because of this month and I'm very proud of them.
I'm much more annoyed I haven't been able to replicate this outside of the contest.
It was fascinating to me how much like programming it was. So much planning, lots of time trying to figure out what isn't working, and a bunch of spelling bugs!
Well worth attempting this if you have the time to exercise your creative muscles.
Anyway, if you have any feedback on my weird stories, I'd love to hear it.
My wife participates in it every year (for many years); in october she gets the outline done, then in november she writes the book, in december she has editors go over it and she publishes during the next year. The productivity of just saying 'this month is fully for writing' and sticking to a minimum word count really has been a very productive mechanism.
Haven't written a novel before. I had an idea a few months back and had been taking notes here and there (fantasy genre). I decided to participate, setting myself a 500 words/day goal. Just crossed 12k words and now I'm hoping to end up around 30k at the end of November. If that pans out, I'll push to finish the first draft in December.
My main goal is to have fun and I did feel great a few times, especially when I thought of something clever or spotted a mistake that'd not work with what I had written a few chapters back.
I’m I love this little challenge. I've participated almost every year since 2010. At the peak of my involvement l was a local organizer (Municipal Liaison). I met a lot of cool people and had a great time at write-ins and such.
It was a good social outlet for me because I have a pretty severe mobility impairment and, long story short, small groups and laid back activities are easier for me to participate in than other things.
I haven't really gotten back into in-person stuff post-COVID, but I still enjoy making November a time to write and hanging out in the local NaNo Discord server. I enjoy perusing the NaNo forums, particularly the Adoption Society, where people offer up plots, characters, running gags, opening lines, chapter-naming schemes, and more for anyone to use.
There's also a bit of fun lore that has developed. For example, if you're stuck, kill a character with the traveling shovel of death ("traveling" because us Wrimos are passing it around). Or find a way to include Mr. Ian Woon (anagram of NaNoWriMo).
NaNoWriMo is different things to different people and I love that about it.
This year and last, I lowered my goal to writing a 20k-word novella. I have difficulty typing and a lower word count makes it a bit easier for me (that makes me a "NaNo rebel" lol I love all the little jokes and stuff).
I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end.
One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see what the characters will do. I don't think that mindset is very compatible with story forms that requires mystery or twists or foreshadowing. My story this month has that so it's been difficult. I'm at 11,000 words now and we're late enough in the month that it's telling me I have to write more than 2,000 words/day to finish. Soon I'll be past the point of no return, where it will be practically impossible to catch up; I think the most I've ever written in a day is 5,000 words.
Ah well, it was still good motivation, and I'm signed on enough to my concept that I'll probably finish it even if I'm not done on 11/30.
>One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality.
That's the point or at least it was in the early days. NaNoWriMo came out of Chris Baty's book, "No Plot? No Problem!" and the point was to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. The point was to sit down and write. As I recall, the book mentions "One Day Novelists' as in "One day I'm going to write a novel...." It's just a kick in the pants to get you to sit down and write. Don't edit, don't re-write, just write.
I've done (and completed) NaNoWriMo a dozen times (2004-2013, 2015, 2020) and I've never had an outline and only a basic idea of a plot when I started,, mainly because I didn't want to start writing before 1 November. One way to handle twists and foreshadowing is not to write it in order (I used to bike to and from work and those 40 minutes each day was when I'd work to what happened next or what happened to get to where I was in the story.)
The first year, I took the "scientific approach" and started out just writing 1,667 words a day. While that was always my daily goal, I did abandon it. The most words I wrote in a single day was 10,596 (20-Nov-2007).
Congratulate yourself it is a great internal achievement to finish writing something. I just published my first book this month, I'm not sure how the mojo came, it certainly wasn't a special month though I did manage 10K words during last NaNoWriMo.
The floodgates opening for me was being stuck in a hotel room during a cyclone for 3 days without power and an old Chromebook which I nursed to fourteen hours of battery by turning the brightness all the way down and closing the lid to put it in sleep mode during the times I was thinking. That got me the re-start I needed.
For the record, the point of NaNoWriMo is pure word count, and folks consider December to be "National Novel Editing Month" where you refine the word vomit.
Obviously this is not the only approach to writing, and some folks are incompatible with the concept of "just write with abandon" and "sort it all out and refine it in edit".
If you want to write and edit at the same time, consider halving your total word count (since they take two months to do that), or double your time (and continue through December).
Well, the explicit goal of NaNoWriMo is word count, not quality. You aren't wrong in your analysis, but NaNoWriMo is not the event through which you write complex stories and spend a ton of time thinking about each scene. It's pretty explicitly for plowing through as many words as possible in 30 days.
An analogy I would make is that a marathon is measured as 26.2 miles. It's not measured in minutes or hours -- it's not the 2:30 run, for example. The standard of success is measured in miles, not minutes. Similarly, NaNoWriMo is measured in words, not quality or twists or ready-to-be-published state.
You are right, though. It's good motivation. I've finished every year for 10 years, but I've never gotten anything to a state I would consider to be even remotely publishable. :)
Writing (and illustrating) an amateur novel is the most creative fun I've ever had. Highly recommended if you have a mind to try. (trained artist, but software developer by day)
I wrote one[1] about 5 years ago. It's amateur and too long, but it's my great American novel, for better or worse! It actually took 4 years, but so much fun! The most annoying part was getting it into a viable ePub. I ended up using Sigil, as it was the easiest to use at the time.
Why would they need to be prepared? NaNo is on you, you don't get anything for winning other than satisfaction and online badges and stuff from sponsors, such as some promo codes for writing software and getting your initial draft printed.
A text that reads "Rabbit." written 50,000 times is enough to win NaNo.
As others have mentioned, since it's self-driven, this would not be a problem. Rather than viewing it as a problem, in fact, one could use AI to "ensure" they produced finished or clean pieces of writing.
I'm less in the frame of thought of using AI to "write a 800 word story on leprechauns" and more in the situation of "edit my lead paragraph in the same style as my concluding paragraph" or "here is an outline of my story, critique it and give me a structure to follow for a second draft".
As a self-driven exercise then, AI becomes just another tool for a writer to get better. Sometimes it's a training wheel, sometimes it's a rocket strapped to your butt.
The only "win" is personal and if you want to define your win in terms of ML/AI, that's for you to decide and mostly just between you and your keyboard. But there's a lot of neat resources and a different sense of accomplishment/competition/cooperation if you choose to focus on it as a NaNoGenMo project instead of a NaNoWriMo project.
Back when I did this, you could already technically "win" the pat on the back just by copying and pasting 50,000 words of gibberish to meet their word count. But then you would be cheating yourself: the point isn't truly to get the award at the end, but rather to challenge yourself to write 50,000 words in a month, to make novel writing seem less like an impossible task.
I remember there being a group out there that had the same competition but trying to tweak a good LLM to write a novel in a month, but I couldn't find it again and it was before the ChatGPT heyday.
From what I remember when I last tried it, NaNoWriMo worked with the honor system. If you wanted you could paste a wikipedia article in the editor and it would count the words and tell you good job, but you'd only be lying to yourself in the end.
It's interesting to read the criticisms of NaNoWriMo because they don't really change. I have completed it for 15 years in a row, then on year 16 I sort of hit a wall and this year I am deliberately not doing it. But my friend and I have been doing it since high school. The point is usually not about doing it to become published but rather to have fun. I'm not sure if I would have been able to do it without going to some of the in-person write-ins. I even know someone who met their husband at a in-person write-in.
I did NaNoWriMo in 2010 and it was a great experience and produced a not very good genre novel about the first sentient AI’s inability to deal with humans and how the human race survived the biotech apocalypse. The “write fast get it done” format liberated me from the need to make sense. Let it rip!
I remember doing this back when I was 11 or 12. Very nostalgic. I wish I could find the short novel I wrote back then but it seems like I purged all my files.
I am not participating in it exactly, but I'm finishing up my next novel draft right now and it is still really satisfying to work alongside all the NaNo-ers. Coincidentally this can also be a nice time to get that writing or editing software you might be interested in, since many of them run sales around NaNoWriMo.
I've finally managed to complete it in 2021 and 2022. This year is much harder because writing prose causes a lot of hard topics to get brought up from my subconscious into my everyday, but I'm still aiming for 50k this year and not giving up.
NaNoWriMo, though a net positive force in the world, strikes me as a creative exercise for non-creatives. Truly not a bad thing, no offense intended. Trying to create regularly will help you become more creative.
However, if you're already someone that is able to maintain a writing schedule and hit daily targets of hundreds of words, and can see your dream works emerge through the simple act of scheduling... I'm gently skeptical of where your motivation to create comes from. Bear with me.
Before we get bogged down in it: Misery and disorder are not requisites for creativity and I'm certainly not advocating that, either.
The issue is that trying to hit some sort of material target by artificially imposing a daily grind on it forces your work into a box created by the work-a-day-world. An undeniably effective one, but for everything?
The global marketplace is what sets deadlines like "by the end of the day!" and "by the end of the month!" where as works of art and creators can both bloom like flowers and get seasoned over large segments of time like waves washing over a rock face.
Your arc as an artist or creator, starting from the discovery of that impulse inside yourself, may be one that spans decades or your entire life. If that's the case, success or failure in NanoWriMo may be a bad indicator for you:
"Oh shit, I missed my 7pm writing alarm and forgot to write ~1700 words, now I'll never be the next Charles Dickens!"
could come from the same writer as:
"After a slow walk through my city on a crisp fall morning, I can sit down and write 5000 words without so much as stopping to stretch my wrist."
and:
"I don't practice art regularly, but sometimes when I get the urge, I will be in the throes for 3 days trying to work out the specifics of an image that has flashed into my mind."
These and many other creative modes are valid and exist independently of schedules, clocks, word counts, time limits and other cops we might invite to sit by our writing desks, easels and computer terminals.
The problem is that most people just fundamentally don't want to make art. NaNoWriMo is in many ways just an excuse to force themselves to do so "because they know they should".
jdriselvato|2 years ago
So when I got laid off earlier in the year I started working on an alternative to NaNo.
https://penpinery.com
At the moment it's in MVP but it current has:
- Author profiles w/ blogging - Publication cataloging + reader reviews - WIP cataloging with word count tracking - A community feed similar to Goodreads + WIP word count updates
The idea is I think NaNo could be more social post-November. With Pen Pinery's current MVP I think Authors can build a readership fanbase much easier than anything NaNo could do.
In the future I want to also have goal tracking based on pages instead of word count and for editing as well. I also think there's a lot of potential for building out an ARC sign up system.
Pretty much I've self-published 15+ books and I'm putting everything that worked for me into a social author/reading platform.
Authors who use NaNo or are completely against it, I'd love to get some feedback on the concept from a description standpoint. Any thoughts or tips?
---
Since this is YC, the tech stack is Django 4, Postgres and Bootstrap 5; Hosted on DigitalOcean.
notatoad|2 years ago
i love self-published books and back a few authors on patreon that i've found on royalroad, but there's not a chance i'd be buying books from unkown self-published authors without even a few sample chapters. especially not when the pitch is that it's something an author has created by churning out as much wordcount as possible during a writing challenge.
drusepth|2 years ago
If you end up adding an API or looking for other sites to partner with, feel free to reach out sometime (email on profile). Not sure what your needs are but I might be able to help from Notebook.ai. :)
boznz|2 years ago
You are right nobody cares about your novel but the rush from finishing and publishing something even if nobody reads it is pretty satisfying.
schaefer|2 years ago
aoanla|2 years ago
I attempted it twice in consecutive years about a decade and a half ago, and not only failed to complete anything, but was also driven into a worse depression because of it. I had to avoid people talking about it in November for years afterwards or I'd start to relapse, too.
starkparker|2 years ago
No matter how well you plan, you really only get two meaningful weeks before the wall hits you. "Just set a reasonable word count to hit every day!" Then each day you miss days because your side dish plans went sideways or your flights get rescheduled, making the goal steeper every other day.
"Use your travel time to write more!" Almost impossible with young kids without sticking a spouse or relative with watching them, and the resentment of even asking if you can ignore kids to write lasts a hell of a lot longer than November.
"You can catch up after Thanksgiving!" Not after anti-vax Aunt J gives your family the gift of some great new viral disease that hits in the last week.
There are writing sprints in other months that never seem to have the community of NaNo, and all your single or childless writer friends burn it all out during NaNo. The community is a big part of what makes it fun, otherwise it's just an arbitrary chore goal.
bowsamic|2 years ago
My therapist told me that in Germany there is an idiom that in English translates to "if you want to prove that you will fail you will always succeed". If I did NaNoWriMo, I would have the full expectation that I will fail, even if I try to tell myself that I have hope it would go well, and so I will just naturally make myself fail.
swagempire|2 years ago
I'm much more annoyed I haven't been able to replicate this outside of the contest.
Hope you feel better now.
edent|2 years ago
I decided to do it as a series of short sci-fi stories. You can read them at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/TalesOfTheAlgorithm
It was fascinating to me how much like programming it was. So much planning, lots of time trying to figure out what isn't working, and a bunch of spelling bugs!
Well worth attempting this if you have the time to exercise your creative muscles.
Anyway, if you have any feedback on my weird stories, I'd love to hear it.
karmakurtisaani|2 years ago
I might just suck at it, but if didn't someone would probably pay me to do it.
tluyben2|2 years ago
mark_l_watson|2 years ago
I belong to a local self-published authors group in my small town. We are going to cover NaNoWriMo this weekend.
asicsp|2 years ago
My main goal is to have fun and I did feel great a few times, especially when I thought of something clever or spotted a mistake that'd not work with what I had written a few chapters back.
blakewatson|2 years ago
It was a good social outlet for me because I have a pretty severe mobility impairment and, long story short, small groups and laid back activities are easier for me to participate in than other things.
I haven't really gotten back into in-person stuff post-COVID, but I still enjoy making November a time to write and hanging out in the local NaNo Discord server. I enjoy perusing the NaNo forums, particularly the Adoption Society, where people offer up plots, characters, running gags, opening lines, chapter-naming schemes, and more for anyone to use.
There's also a bit of fun lore that has developed. For example, if you're stuck, kill a character with the traveling shovel of death ("traveling" because us Wrimos are passing it around). Or find a way to include Mr. Ian Woon (anagram of NaNoWriMo).
NaNoWriMo is different things to different people and I love that about it.
This year and last, I lowered my goal to writing a 20k-word novella. I have difficulty typing and a lower word count makes it a bit easier for me (that makes me a "NaNo rebel" lol I love all the little jokes and stuff).
tunesmith|2 years ago
One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see what the characters will do. I don't think that mindset is very compatible with story forms that requires mystery or twists or foreshadowing. My story this month has that so it's been difficult. I'm at 11,000 words now and we're late enough in the month that it's telling me I have to write more than 2,000 words/day to finish. Soon I'll be past the point of no return, where it will be practically impossible to catch up; I think the most I've ever written in a day is 5,000 words.
Ah well, it was still good motivation, and I'm signed on enough to my concept that I'll probably finish it even if I'm not done on 11/30.
5555624|2 years ago
That's the point or at least it was in the early days. NaNoWriMo came out of Chris Baty's book, "No Plot? No Problem!" and the point was to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. The point was to sit down and write. As I recall, the book mentions "One Day Novelists' as in "One day I'm going to write a novel...." It's just a kick in the pants to get you to sit down and write. Don't edit, don't re-write, just write.
I've done (and completed) NaNoWriMo a dozen times (2004-2013, 2015, 2020) and I've never had an outline and only a basic idea of a plot when I started,, mainly because I didn't want to start writing before 1 November. One way to handle twists and foreshadowing is not to write it in order (I used to bike to and from work and those 40 minutes each day was when I'd work to what happened next or what happened to get to where I was in the story.)
The first year, I took the "scientific approach" and started out just writing 1,667 words a day. While that was always my daily goal, I did abandon it. The most words I wrote in a single day was 10,596 (20-Nov-2007).
boznz|2 years ago
The floodgates opening for me was being stuck in a hotel room during a cyclone for 3 days without power and an old Chromebook which I nursed to fourteen hours of battery by turning the brightness all the way down and closing the lid to put it in sleep mode during the times I was thinking. That got me the re-start I needed.
criley2|2 years ago
Obviously this is not the only approach to writing, and some folks are incompatible with the concept of "just write with abandon" and "sort it all out and refine it in edit".
If you want to write and edit at the same time, consider halving your total word count (since they take two months to do that), or double your time (and continue through December).
Jemaclus|2 years ago
An analogy I would make is that a marathon is measured as 26.2 miles. It's not measured in minutes or hours -- it's not the 2:30 run, for example. The standard of success is measured in miles, not minutes. Similarly, NaNoWriMo is measured in words, not quality or twists or ready-to-be-published state.
You are right, though. It's good motivation. I've finished every year for 10 years, but I've never gotten anything to a state I would consider to be even remotely publishable. :)
eludwig|2 years ago
I wrote one[1] about 5 years ago. It's amateur and too long, but it's my great American novel, for better or worse! It actually took 4 years, but so much fun! The most annoying part was getting it into a viable ePub. I ended up using Sigil, as it was the easiest to use at the time.
[1] https://darladarling.com (free ePub)
ActionHank|2 years ago
phoe-krk|2 years ago
A text that reads "Rabbit." written 50,000 times is enough to win NaNo.
staticman2|2 years ago
instagraham|2 years ago
I'm less in the frame of thought of using AI to "write a 800 word story on leprechauns" and more in the situation of "edit my lead paragraph in the same style as my concluding paragraph" or "here is an outline of my story, critique it and give me a structure to follow for a second draft".
As a self-driven exercise then, AI becomes just another tool for a writer to get better. Sometimes it's a training wheel, sometimes it's a rocket strapped to your butt.
WorldMaker|2 years ago
The only "win" is personal and if you want to define your win in terms of ML/AI, that's for you to decide and mostly just between you and your keyboard. But there's a lot of neat resources and a different sense of accomplishment/competition/cooperation if you choose to focus on it as a NaNoGenMo project instead of a NaNoWriMo project.
jyunwai|2 years ago
octokatt|2 years ago
I remember there being a group out there that had the same competition but trying to tweak a good LLM to write a novel in a month, but I couldn't find it again and it was before the ChatGPT heyday.
glanzwulf|2 years ago
anonzzzies|2 years ago
FourHand451|2 years ago
rfreytag|2 years ago
See the Oct 29, Nov 5, and Nov 12th episodes so far.
mkerrigan|2 years ago
leashless|2 years ago
Good luck.
Edit: the novel http://files.howtolivewiki.com/MOTHER_OF_HYDROGEN_NOVEL/inde...
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
acheong08|2 years ago
drakonka|2 years ago
phoe-krk|2 years ago
Jemaclus|2 years ago
spiritplumber|2 years ago
Waterluvian|2 years ago
I find myself with 20 mins here, 40 mins there, and half the time gets spent trying to find a decent short story.
23B1|2 years ago
harperlee|2 years ago
deafpolygon|2 years ago
November.
cfr2023|2 years ago
However, if you're already someone that is able to maintain a writing schedule and hit daily targets of hundreds of words, and can see your dream works emerge through the simple act of scheduling... I'm gently skeptical of where your motivation to create comes from. Bear with me.
Before we get bogged down in it: Misery and disorder are not requisites for creativity and I'm certainly not advocating that, either.
The issue is that trying to hit some sort of material target by artificially imposing a daily grind on it forces your work into a box created by the work-a-day-world. An undeniably effective one, but for everything?
The global marketplace is what sets deadlines like "by the end of the day!" and "by the end of the month!" where as works of art and creators can both bloom like flowers and get seasoned over large segments of time like waves washing over a rock face.
Your arc as an artist or creator, starting from the discovery of that impulse inside yourself, may be one that spans decades or your entire life. If that's the case, success or failure in NanoWriMo may be a bad indicator for you:
"Oh shit, I missed my 7pm writing alarm and forgot to write ~1700 words, now I'll never be the next Charles Dickens!"
could come from the same writer as:
"After a slow walk through my city on a crisp fall morning, I can sit down and write 5000 words without so much as stopping to stretch my wrist."
and:
"I don't practice art regularly, but sometimes when I get the urge, I will be in the throes for 3 days trying to work out the specifics of an image that has flashed into my mind."
These and many other creative modes are valid and exist independently of schedules, clocks, word counts, time limits and other cops we might invite to sit by our writing desks, easels and computer terminals.
bowsamic|2 years ago