If writing a novel has long been on your bucket list, it's time to stop dreaming and get a draft done — using whatever tools you like to overcome your fear of the blank page.
The event known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, turns 25 this year. Participants around the world are invited to "win" by finishing a draft of 50,000 words at breakneck speed between November 1 and November 30, without worrying too much about the quality of the draft. That may sound onerous, but it breaks down to just under 1,667 words a day. (Full disclosure: I participated once 15 years ago, and that daily word goal is still seared into my brain.)
So far, so uncontroversial. NaNoWriMo has helped many writers over the years, leading to global bestsellers such as Wool by Hugh Howey (the basis for Apple TV's Silo) and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. The San Francisco-based organization behind it, also called NaNoWriMo, is now a nonprofit pulling in $1.2 million a year from donations and sponsorships — not a massive number, but enough for four full-time employees who run a handful of writing programs for adults and kids.
But in 2024, arguments over Artificial Intelligence, and how much we should be using it, are as unavoidable as the U.S. election. An answer about AI in a NaNoWriMo FAQ in September, affirming that the organization is OK if you want to use AI tools in writing that 50,000-word draft, sparked a firestorm of controversy. The organization tweaked its answer several times in response. Still, long-time fans of the event, many of whom participate every year, reacted with fury. A few famous authors, including Morgenstern, withdrew their support.
Judging by the backlash, you'd think NaNoWriMo had encouraged authors to use AI, instead of simply declaring itself neutral. You'd also think the organization was involved in some evil scheme to train AI models using thousands of novels — despite the fact that the NaNoWriMo site asks only for your word count, not your actual content. (Whether you "win" or not is on the honor system; this isn't a race with other writers, only with yourself.)
"The dilemma of any global, online community is that there's no good way to have nuanced conversations," says Kilby Blades, novelist and (as of this year) director of NaNoWriMo. "The fact that writers don't have a shared understanding of AI, or a shared understanding of what some of these writing tools do, shows how unstable some of the commentary is and how far from productive discussions we are."
The AI novelist
So let's define our terms. What AI tools are we talking about, exactly, and how much labor can they save?
Any Large Language Model, like ChatGPT or Claude, can spit out a short story on demand. Ask it to whip up an entire novel, however, and you'll be disappointed. In theory, the paid version of GPT-4 can produce 25,000 words at a time, but that may require a high-tech workaround using an Application Programming Interface. You're more likely to run up against a 4,000-word limit.
"I can't generate a complete 50,000-word draft in one go," GPT-4 warned when I asked. "But I can help you outline the novel, develop characters, and write it in sections. If you have a specific idea or genre in mind, we can start building it piece by piece!"
That brings us to the second problem with AI-written fiction: Without your constant input, and often with it, the output just isn't that good. Character names and descriptions tend to change. The prose can be unreadably turgid. For proof, check out the declining quality of self-published books in Amazon's Kindle store. There's no way of knowing how much of it was written by AI, exactly, but given that the Amazon algorithm apparently rewards authors who churn out more than 20 books in a few years, it's likely to be a lot.
There are, of course, more specialized AI apps for novelists, such as NovelAI and Squibler. Probably the best-known is Sudowrite, which uses a dozen LLMs including GPT and Claude. Sudowrite offers one-click options such as brainstorming and rewriting a chapter if you don't like its first version. One reviewer says she used it to help produce two YA sci-fi novels, one of which reached the top spot on Amazon's Kindle store.
But using AI this way can also be expensive. Sudowrite currently offers three subscription tiers that give you a limited number of credits: 225,000 for $19 a month up to 2 million credits for $59 a month. "If you count the misses / derails / plainly wrong results, you end up paying a lot," said one frustrated Reddit user — who estimated that 85 percent of Sudowrite's output was unusable.
Other than the expense, there are plenty more good reasons not to use an AI writing service. For one thing, there's the still-unknown impact on the environment. And then there's the digital library being used to train AI models, reportedly drawn from pirated books. Authors on that list have good reason to be furious, and Silicon Valley's careless approach to inflating its AI stock bubble isn't helping anyone trust the technology.
But as NaNoWriMo's director points out, a tiny nonprofit can't do much about this one way or the other. "There is real advocacy to be done around these issues, real demands that writers should be making of publishers," Blades says. "We wish more people knew that advocacy is outside our scope, and that we've never had a seat at industry tables." Groups such as the Author's Guild, meanwhile, have advocacy built into their charters.
Down at the writer level, though, individual choice rules. If your story has hit a dead end and you don't want to show it to another human just yet, AI might be the quickest way to get you back into flow. If all writing is rewriting — as Hemingway didn't quite say — then AI can provide a base layer on which you paint your masterpiece. The organization doesn't say this, but in the future it's possible that AI may alter the entire concept of NaNoWriMo. If anyone can "win" with 50,000 words of pure pink slime, perhaps a better goal is to produce the best 50,000 word draft that you can in one month.
But for 2024, at least, the mission hasn't changed. "People come to NaNoWriMo because they have a dream, and because they don't want to be alone on their writing journeys," Blades says. We are social animals, after all; when it comes to motivation to finish that bucket-list novel, a sloppy AI-written first draft is nothing next to the power of community.
