Writing Updates, NaNoWriMo 2024, and AI
The month of November is on the way. But I guess technically everything except for this moment and whatever happened before is also on the way. Anyway, this year no new stories are screaming inside my head and demanding to be written just yet. I guess that means this NaNoWriMo I’ll be continuing an “old” story I’ve yet to finish, but I’ll keep the door open should I want to write down other ideas in story form.
I’ve recently been in a weird place where I’ve been preoccupied with editing another “old” story to get it in some sort of shape to then shop around with possible agents and publishers. I want to get that editing done, but is editing ever really done? Heh. This particular story is the sequel to my novel Not James. I plan to publish it in the near future…
Speaking of writing and NaNoWriMo, it was recently brought to my attention that the people who run NaNoWriMo had a controversial take on artificial intelligence (AI). In short, they neither support nor condemn AI. Their original take was somewhat presumptuous and reductive while their updated take was more neutral. To be honest, I more or less agree with their take. I didn’t necessarily view what they originally said to mean everyone who dismisses AI is “ableist” and/or “classist.” Though I think they were being somewhat prescriptive with these buzzwords, as well as, again, presumptuous and reductive in suggesting AI to be a tool for have-nots and invalids, they weren’t entirely off-base. But, people seemed to overlook that and took their statements to the extreme (in my opinion, to a disingenuous degree), believing them to be saying disabled people can’t write without AI, stories can be entirely AI-written, etc. I don’t think they were saying that at all. I think they were saying AI can be a useful tool in writing—not for writing for you, but for critique and research purposes. At least, that’s what I interpret their stance on AI to be. And I agree with it insofar as that interpretation.
That said, I haven’t used AI for my writing and I don’t plan on using it. I do think it can be a useful tool, I’m simply not a fan of it. I guess I consider it to be a tool that does thinking for me, and I’d rather not outsource thinking. Beyond writing, in the grand scheme of things, someone smarter or at least more knowledgeable than me on AI could better describe its strengths and limits. My fill-in-the-gap knowledge and beliefs about it are much the same in that I think AI can be a nice assistive tool and not a directive tool. Anyway, NaNoWriMo has something else that I do fault its staff for, which is shutting down its forums. The forums as of now are still down, but they apparently are meant to reopen at some point. To borrow a phrase from Elon Musk, the online forums are like the town square. I hardly contributed to the conversations going on there, but seeing the conversations about writing was nice. Nuking the town square was a terrible move. Without it, NaNoWriMo simply functions as a public word count tracker which Microsoft Word already does for me. People have asked, “Is NaNoWriMo dead?” and it’s a fair question. Having a community is a pretty valuable thing. NaNoWriMo can probably recover, as long as a community is fostered.
I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room regarding the reason why the NaNoWriMo forums were shut down. To sum up this controversy, it was due to accusations of child exploitation and bad actors. Pretty serious stuff. I know I said it was a terrible move to shut down the forums—if they were truly as mismanaged and fundamentally flawed as the accusations described, then shutting them down was probably a good move albeit drastic. To return to that question of whether NaNoWriMo is dead, I guess my answer is maybe. At least for some. I still see some value and potential in the website’s utility, so it’s not really dead for me. I still plan to treat November as National Novel Writing Month regardless of the website. That’s just about all I have to say about that.
