Why not National Newsletter Writing Month?

Hangovers, dentist appointments, loud neighbors, letters from readers, rants about fascists, and 1,700 words per day. John Steinbeck didn’t write The Grapes of Wrath in a month (it took him five) but, if his journal was anything to go by, he would have fit right in with the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, crowd. “Every book seems the struggle of a whole life. And then, when it is done — pouf. Never happened,” he wrote in his journal. “Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.”

Importantly, though, Steinbeck did not believe in output over wellbeing. His Working Days journals describe hosting dinner parties and getting drunk at rodeos. He titles one day “Bad Lazy Time” and tries to assuage his feelings that “this book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.” But Steinbeck persevered, finishing one of the greatest novels of all time inside of 100 days of writing.

Anyone could organize their own writing sprint, at any time of year, but we lost something when it became a less organized or centralized community and support network for aspiring authors. Newsletters, though, are still going strong, and come with an audience holding you accountable, much like NaNoWriMo’s community.

Like a novel, it isn’t especially hard to start writing a newsletter. It’s maintaining a consistent output with no clear endpoint or win condition that’s challenging. So why not just create a goal and deadline? Why not replace NaNoWriMo with National Newsletter Writing Month (NaNeWriMo)? A mildly audacious once-a-year injection of frenzied writing, shared with fellow senders and subscribers, to create a temporary goal to strive for and experiment with. All the same community and camaraderie with none of the all-or-nothing finish line.

More formats to play with

A novel is a singular thing, plotted and structured around characters and story beats, collected into a linear artifact. Publishing one is absolutely a bucket-list achievement! But longform fiction and non-fiction isn’t for everyone. With a newsletter, you could keep the same basic requirements–50k words in 30 days–and drastically broaden the scope of what would count as a win.

Instead of writing and sending every day, you might spend the month building an email course, serializing your writing into a drip sequence, creating a director’s commentary for your creative process, or running a single-topic pop-up newsletter. Any one of those could be limited to a one-time run, or kept alive as always-open sequences that remain evergreen for months or years. Of course, there’s also nothing wrong with using your 30-day writing sprint to simply get ahead of schedule on what you’re already doing.

If you have a newsletter that doesn’t rely on current events, NaNeWriMo would be a chance to create a bank of finished issues that you schedule to send in the future. “People sometimes ask how I write the email every morning, which of course, I don’t,” Ryan Holiday admits when talking about his newsletter, The Daily Stoic. “I write for a couple of hours every day, and I write in batches...We’re probably 3-4 months ahead at any time.” After a month’s worth of 1,700-word days, you’d have enough rainy-day material to prevent missing a deadline because of travel, being sick, or focusing on other projects.

Heck, a newsletter doesn’t even have to be limited to the email format. You could use the 30 days to create a snail mail newsletter or convert your past issues into a printed zine. In either case, the frenetic, high-wordcount pace of a sprint just feels suited to the conversational and relationship-driven tone of newsletters. A novel aims to be an airtight three-act plot; a newsletter is a message from a friend.

If the quantity-over-quality philosophy of NaNoWriMo never sat well with you, the more freewheeling, Write It Like You Told It format of newsletters makes far more sense. Especially when you’re working on it publicly.

More community to engage with

Writing a novel is often an isolating experience. "The day is lonely today,” Steinbeck journaled near the end of his work on The Grapes of Wrath. “The world is crazy and I wonder whether it will ever be sane again. Probably not.” This was one of the primary reasons Chris Baty created NaNoWriMo, to make his own writing experience more uplifting and supportive. Something that is now obvious in retrospect, with messages on the event’s early Yahoo bulletin boards like “Writing is not a lonely word. Not any more. The antisocial art is like a tennis club thanks to NaNoWriMo.”

Accountability is one of the clearest byproducts of novel-writing as a group exercise. And several studies back up the idea that NaNoWriMo had at least one of the essential ingredients for procrastination-reducing deadlines: that they be externally imposed and evenly spaced. Authors committed via the event bulletin board or website, and would self-report how far they’d gotten throughout the month. With a newsletter, you don’t need the central planner, though. A signup page and a promised cadence to subscribers is enough to be externally imposed and evenly spaced.

Once you’ve publicly committed, you can’t back down without disappointing anyone who was interested. “Terror is the amateur novelist’s best friend. Without some amount of it pushing you onward toward your goal, you’re going to lose momentum and quit,” Baty wrote in his book No Plot? No Problem! “Happily, with a little work, your friends and family can terrify you in ways you’d never imagined.” Still, only around 20% of people who attempted NaNoWriMo actually made it to 50k words. But it’s not hard to imagine a newsletter writing month blowing past that thanks to both the medium’s serialized format, off-the-cuff tone, and self-imposed sending schedules.

Insignificant as it might seem, a 30-day sprint that starts on the first of the month seems to be significantly more likely to succeed than one that begins on a less memorable date, like the 17th. One study calls this the Fresh Start Effect, noting that people have more motivation to tackle daring goals aligned with “temporal landmarks,” like an entire month, beginning to end. Tracking that doesn’t require any extra cognitive load for you or your subscribers, especially if you’re sending periodically throughout the month and your emails appear in inboxes that put the date right next to your subject line.

Something else that newsletters can accommodate that makes less sense for a novel is writing swaps. You could, for example, set up a guest newsletter ring, increasing how much skin you (and others!) have in the game by allocating some of your 50k words to write for someone else’s newsletter. To get subscribers in on the challenge you might promise freebies if you only make it part way to the goal, offering three months of free premium subscriptions for all if you manage less than 35k words, for example. Then, add the month’s total word count to every subject line and enable comments on your archives to generate a running commentary on the month.

Regardless of how exactly you go about recruiting readers and fellow senders to participate in your newsletter month, you’ll end up publishing more content, even if you don’t end up hitting 50k words. And that’s more than most NaNoWriMo authors can say.

Less burn out to deal with

After his 100 days or writing and The Grapes of Wrath was submitted to his publisher, it was a full year before Steinbeck returned to writing the following November, a respite familiar to any author who attempted back-to-back NaNoWriMo challenges before the nonprofit shuttered in 2025. Even today, writing 50k words in 30 days (1,666 words per day if you write every day, 2,500 if you skip weekends) is in that Goldilocks zone of audacious-but-doable for the average person. Whether you’re writing a novel or a newsletter, there will always be the looming threat of burnout. Still, a high-volume month of newsletters seems, to me at least, more fun to write and more fun to read than a hastily drafted novel.

A newsletter would give you a reason to reach out to senders in your niche or area of interest, inviting them to do the challenge with you. You’d learn how your writing and your audience changes when sending new types of content at a faster pace. And when the topic you’re writing about feels stiff or awkward, you could simply change it. You can’t kill a main character halfway through your novel, but you can take your newsletter in a new direction whenever you like.

Steinbeck technically completed two writing sprints concurrently: The Grapes of Wrath and the 100+ pages of Working Days journals he kept to “map the actual working days and hours of a novel. If a day is skipped it will show glaringly on this record and there will be some reason given for the slip.” The novel far outweighs the journal in terms of broad cultural and literary value. But the emotional, vulnerable, freeform writing in Working Days is priceless to the nearly 100 years of authors who see themselves in Steinbeck’s struggles with self-doubt and loneliness, laziness and distractions.

“When I think how I am not following orders to do what people think I should do, I am scared, but then I think that it is my own work, if anything, that will be remembered,” he wrote near the end of the journal. “I can’t work for other people. I don’t do good work with their ideas. So I’ll go on with my own.” For Steinbeck, those ideas became a novel. For you? Maybe they’ll fit better into a newsletter.