PhiNoWriMo
Or: How I Learned I Can Still Do The Thing Without Doing The Thing
Last November, I tried writing a novel in a month.
This wasn’t just me temporarily losing my mind; I was taking part in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short), an annual online event that’s been happening since 1999. It’s a very simple idea. You start writing on November 1, and try to reach 50,000 words by November 30; according to my phone’s calculator, that works out to just shy of 1,700 words daily.
I didn’t quite make it that far. Things got off to a rocky start when I spent the first few days fighting off a fever of 39°C (that’s 102°F for any non-metric users) and I never really recovered. It didn’t help that I had a day job and a two-year-old at home, meaning that — as I’ve previously mentioned — my writing tends to happen at night. In the end, I managed 30,385 words: just over 1,010 words every single day.
For months, I’ve been gearing myself up to have another go in 2024 with a brand-new project. I even read the first few pages at a novel slam earlier this month, and got some invaluable feedback from published authors and other people in the industry. But then, in August, the organisers of NaNoWriMo decided that they were perfectly fine with people using generative AI programs like ChatGPT to help them write their novels.
My stance on generative AI, like that of many writers I know, is simple: it’s fucking awful. Not only does it require obscene amounts of energy to operate, but the large language models that it’s trained on often take copyrighted works without the permission of their original authors. It is, in essence, a giant plagiarism machine, and anybody who uses it to create fiction doesn’t deserve to call themselves a writer.
Thankfully, it seems like a lot of the NaNoWriMo community share my sentiments. Users have been deleting their accounts in droves — myself included. But the whole thing is still tinged with sadness. Writing is a solitary affair, and the idea of focusing on a manuscript for a month with a community of writers around me to egg me on was keeping me afloat through some tough creative dry spells
But then I had an epiphany: just because I’m not doing NaNoWriMo anymore, doesn’t mean I’m can’t do NaNoWriMo anymore.
I still have everything I need — a keyboard, some fingers to type with, and a decent idea for a sci-fi kitchen sink drama* floating around in my head. As for community? I have a dozen writer friends who would be interested in hearing about the challenge. Heck, some might even take it up themselves. The only thing that’s missing is a place to make updates about my progress, and I don’t need a fancy branded forum to do that. I can do that anywhere.
On this newsletter, for example.
So that’s what I’m going to do: every day in the month of November, I’m going to sit down and write as much as I can. I’m calling it “Phil’s Novel Writing Month” — or PhiNoWriMo for short. It’s like NaNoWriMo but better, because a) generative AI is forbidden and b) there’s a plentiful supply of chocolate hobnobs.
I’ll also leave some updates here (probably once a week) to describe how I’m getting on and how badly I want to bash my head on my desk. I might even share some snippets of what I’m writing, here and there.
I don’t expect to beat my record: I still have the day job, and this year the two-year-old has been replaced with a three-year-old. But hopefully, I can get some of these pesky ideas out of my head and onto the page.
*It’s called The Grass is Always Greener in the Other Dimension. Think Sliding Doors meets Everything Everywhere All At Once.
And now… a poem.
I’ve been writing lots of poems about fatherhood over the last few months. Maybe when November’s over I can turn some of them into a book. Here’s a short and silly one for you.
Support Group
“My name’s Phil,”
I say to the circle of chairs in front of me,
“and I’m a Dad joke addict.”
“Nice to meet you Phil,”
say the other men sitting around the room.
“I’m Dad.”