The premise of National Novel Writing Month is seductively simple: Participants enter the month of November with an idea and leave it as a novelist. Just write 50,000 words over the course of 30 days—a rate of roughly 1,700 words a day. Anyone age 13 or older can take part, which is perhaps why my first introduction to what its adherents call NaNoWriMo came through Tumblr, where every November 1 seemingly half of my dashboard disappeared overnight.
For 30 days and 30 nights, my mutuals tinkered away at their novels (and then snuck back onto Tumblr to complain about how hard that tinkering was). They asked me to yell at them if I saw them posting. And then, one by one, they gave up their novels and returned to replenishing my feeds with One Direction GIFs and essays on colonialism in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. Over time I got the impression that NaNoWriMo was more of a community-building enterprise than a pure literary one. I was never tempted to take part myself. Mostly out of laziness, but I was also never quite convinced that any novel I wrote in a month could be very good. And I had trouble swallowing the concept of participating in something as heinously named as NaNoWriMo.
