NaNoWriMo and the creative power of looming fear

It was 1999, peak dot com bubble San Francisco, a balmy July where the temperatures never hit 80°F. What better time for a picnic in Dolores park—or to sequester yourself and 20 friends inside a café, every day, that entire July?

Sounded like as good an idea as any to Chris Baty, an editor and freelance writer with a self-declared “history of dragging friends into questionable endeavors.”

“I want to write a novel,” he’d emailed his friends on the last day of May. “In a month. And I want you to write one too.”

Which, perhaps, isn’t as batty as it seems. Anthony Burgess dashed off A Clockwork Orange in three weeks. As did Jack Kerouac with On the Road. Robert Louis Stevenson feverishly drafted the shorter ‌Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in three days, then rewrote it another six. A month is a comparative lifetime.

Thus deluded into its possibility, Baty started recruiting. “Under the motto ‘A lousy novel is better than no novel at all,’ I have declared July National Novel-Writing Month,” continued Baty’s group email. They’d meet every day, write 1,667 words, then do it again, and again, as a “cross between a marathon and a literary block party” (with the added motivation of peer pressure: “I can’t do this unless I have some other people trying it as well,” he confessed).

One month later, 6 of the 21 had finished manuscripts in hand. It’d worked, this harebrained scheme, despite the fair skies. The next year, Baty moved the venture to November, “to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather.” And it stuck: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, with its serendipitous mnemonic pairing with November, became the way the world would write books, badly, for 25 years.

Set a goal. Any goal is fine.

The official NaNoWriMo is no more, shuttered early 2025 after issues around moderators and the use of AI in writing—yet, in many ways, NaNoWriMo was never anything more than an idea to begin with.

There was no act of Congress ordaining a national writing month, no structure required other than the goal and perseverance. Just like you could go on celebrating National Hot Dog Day even if there was no longer a National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (which, yes, is a real thing, one that officially ruled that a hot dog is not a sandwich), the real NaNoWriMo is people writing for a month on end, not the organization around it.

Even the sacrosanct 50,000 word goal was arbitrary. “Baty arrived at his 50,000-word minimum after doing rough word counts on Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and J.D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’—books of modest length he had on his shelf at home,” reported Susan Carpenter in the Los Angeles Times. Baty himself would later reference Kerouac’s On the Road as another inspiration for NaNoWriMo’s word goal. Yet none of those books contained exactly 50,000 words. They were, instead, a rough inspiration for an easy-to-remember word count, much like how the 10,000 steps per day goal was coined in 1965 by Yamasa Clock to promote their Manpo-kei—literally, “10,000 steps”—pedometer.

What’s in a book? 50,000 words is as good an approximation as any, just as 10,000 steps is a reasonable fitness goal, even if the exact number isn’t magical. You could keep that value, or its per-day count of 1,667 words, as your goal if you’d like. It’s served hundreds of thousands of writers well over the past decades.

Or you could adjust the goal to your writing style. You could make a National Newsletter Writing Month, and write a thousand words a day on your newsletter. You could serialize your book in a newsletter, or start a pop-up newsletter just for the challenge. You could adjust it to your schedule, even, pacing yourself with a goal of writing every weekday, with a couple of rest days baked into your schedule.

Ideally, though, the goal should push you to create more than you typically do, with a finish line in mind. “If you write 1667 words that day, and they are the worst words that have ever been written, that's great. You move on,” shared Baty in a talk at Google about NaNoWriMo. The goal is output, the higher-than-you-might-feel-comfortable-with word count goal pushes you to keep writing without thinking too much about it, and being ok with mediocrity makes it all possible. It’s the Seinfeld method, Don’t Break the Chain, for writing, paired with an almost-too-high writing goal that makes NaNoWriMo memorable, and the finish line that makes the higher output and quantity-over-quality worth it for a sprint.

And sometimes, magic happens in the madness of trying to hit your goal. “When you write for quantity instead of quality, you end up getting both,” Baty says. You’ll end up with “inspiration out of desperation,” as cartographer Tim Lohnes called it after completing NaNoWriMo 2001.

You don’t need the original NaNoWriMo for that push. As Charlie Jane Anders wrote before the last NaNoWriMo in 2023, “I recently cut ties with the NaNoWriMo organization over their endorsement of AI, but it's still awesome for folks [to] spend the month of November crafting a story from scratch.” What matters is having a goal that stretches you—then sticking to it.

Commit to it. Tell everybody.

The easiest way to stick to the goal? Tell everybody about it.

It works for running. Say you’re used to running 5K, and want to push yourself. If you register for a race—any race—and tell your friends that you’ll be running it, odds are you’ll actually do it. The actual distance of a half or full or ultra marathon matters less than having a goal that pushes you and committing to it in public.

“It’s really useful to have that sort of looming fear of personal humiliation,” said Baty about the effect of NaNoWriMo on his writing. The entire challenge was invented to give him the structure to write a first book—and NaNoWriMo turning into an institution was just a happy side effect.

“Originally Baty just wanted company,” wrote Kara Platoni for the East Bay Express after the third NaNoWriMo in 2001, “figuring he’d never finish a novel-length manuscript — not necessarily a good novel; perhaps even a very bad one — unless he had plenty of friends to egg him on.”

The original July ’99 NaNoWriMo was in-person, with 21 people writing in coffee shops, laptop-to-laptop. It’s harder to just scroll through social media or overthink your plot when everyone else is typing away. You don’t want to be the odd one out, dawdling, amid 20 clacking keyboards. As Baty put it, “there’s something about being in a room where everyone’s typing—you just want to type.” Call it peer pressure or positive reinforcement, either way it’s infectious.

You need to find a way to build similar public commitment and peer pressure into your self-directed NaNoWriMo, or it’ll be too easy to take a day off and give up before reaching the finish line. So commit. Email your list and tell them you’re starting a new pop-up newsletter with 1,667 words every day for the next month, or to expect a (possibly terrible) draft of your book a month from now. Pull a Baty and loop your friends in; convince them, too, to tell their audience they’ll be writing daily for a month. Get everyone in the same space or at least on a call each day, for peer motivation.

It’s a marathon, and just as you’d convince a friend to persevere until the finish line if at all possible, egg your friends on to hit the goal, and get them to do the same to you in return.

Done is better than perfect.

Face it: You’re not going to smash any speed records on your first marathon. And your NaNoWriMo writing will not win any awards, either.

“The books that we wrote were not good books,” said Baty of his first NaNoWriMo. “In industry parlance, I think they would be called bad books.”

That was the point. The problem most writers face is the terror of the blank page, far more than the terror of editing and rewriting bad prose. We sit and stare, waiting for inspiration to strike. Yet, as Pablo Picasso put it, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

Better to write, let the words fall out, honestly, then sift the good bits from the chaff. “You can revise a bad book into a great book, but you can't revise a blank page into anything but a blank page,” as Baty told the Google team.

“You cannot escape that first draft,” Baty expanded later to Writer Unboxed’s Theresa Walsh. “The beauty of writing is that you have an opportunity to go back and find the best parts and hone those, and improve and revise and fine tune.”

So start writing. “Quality is of no concern. ... No plot? No worries!” read the original NaNoWriMo invitation. “We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this quickly, and it’s gonna be bad.” The goal and hitting each day’s word goal is all that matters. If you end up writing something great along the way, that’s a bonus. You can always rewrite it in December.

Because somewhere between day one and 30, as one word after another starts adding up to a real book-length manuscript, you’ll start to realize that you can actually just show up and write. “Once you’ve done that, it forever changes the way you write first drafts,” says Baty. Cass Morris concurs: “NaNoWriMo taught me not only how to be a writer, but how to be a writer who finishes projects. It is only by finishing novels that we learn how to write better ones."

The blank page isn’t as terrifying, compared with a looming public deadline. You’ll build the muscle of being able to write on command, and with time you’ll be able to write well with less trepidation and perfectionism.

The question isn’t whether you can write that much; thousands of others, both better and worse writers than you, have proved it’s possible, have written over 24 billion words during the first 20 years of NaNoWriMo. “The question,” says Baty, “is whether you’ll stop trying to be perfect, and start letting yourself be messy.

Header photo by Zoshua Colah via Unsplash