If you haven’t heard about the recent shitstorm surrounding NaNoWriMo, allow me to share an excellent video deep dive.
TL;DR: One of NaNo’s sponsors is an AI company, so they’re doubling down on defending AI because of money. Their claim is that it’s racist, classist, and ableist to condemn AI because people in marginalized groups need it to write books.
This, naturally, is pissing off people in those groups because they’ve been writing just fine with tools that aren’t generating entire books by unethically scrubbing other people’s work.
Anyway!
On to the meat and purpose of this post. I know a lot of writers that get super excited around NaNo time for the community and accountability. It gets them into a groove and helps them brain dump a novel in 30 days.
I’ve done it once or twice, and enjoyed the benefits of discounted subscriptions to different writing tools.
I can tell you, though, that there are many awesome sites and apps and communities out there that will keep you writing, and actually want you to, you know, write. Not tell a bot to barf out a story for you.
*NOTE: I am not professionally affiliated with any of these apps or companies. I don’t get any money for writing this post or sharing this information. I just really love all of these tools and hope they’re helpful for you, too.*
4theWords
4theWords is the ultimate in gamifying your writing. It’s an RPG adventure with quests and monsters and items to collect, and everything progresses based on words written or time spent writing.
You can also dress up your character and build them a cool base, all the fun aesthetic stuff that comes with a good RPG. You can choose to share your stats and interact with other warriors, even joining parties and taking down co-op monsters and quests together.
If ever you needed a kick to just brain-dump, this is the place. I find the co-op quests even more motivating, because I don’t want to let down my team! Just gotta hammer those words and take the monster down together.
There are free and paid plans available, so have a look! If you’re looking to create a daily writing habit with the help of rewards, this is such a great tool.
Online Writing Log
If you want to meticulously track your writing stats, OWL is king. This system was created by Mattias Ahlvin, a science fiction author with a love for spreadsheets and numbers. What started out as a spreadsheet template for helping track NaNoWriMo stats became a full-fledged app that helps users set goals and see what they’ve achieved in an easily accessible way.
There are also leaderboards and challenges for daily and monthly word counts, if you want that competitive spirit to keep you accountable.
There are free and paid plans available for this too, so check it out!
Discord
Okay, hear me out. I know Discord started as a platform for gaming communities, however, people quickly realized that they could use it for all sorts of things. Companies are even using Discord as professional space to communicate with their teams.
So of course there are writing and fandom communities that are great for accountability! Granted, you have to be selective, and some communities are better than others, as in any social media space.
But when you find a good group of supportive writers that just want to write and uplift each other, it’s a great experience! And developers have created some interesting bots that are helpful to writing, such as Writer-Bot or Sprinto. These bots lead sprint sessions, where you enter how long you want to sprint for and your initial word count, and it pings you when the time is up. After you enter your final word count, it calculates everyone’s in the sprint. Some like Writer-Bot give xp for what place you come in, and you can gain levels for cred around the server.
Group sprints are a really fun way to hype each other up and be productive together. Writing can be such a lonely job, it’s nice to do twenty-minute bursts then have a few minutes of chatter in between as if you’re hanging out at the water cooler at work, you know?
So those are some productivity tools, but what about the community aspect? NaNo’s forums were shut down because of some pretty disgusting allegations, but there are a ton more communities out there.
4theWords has forums, and Discord is a social platform. What about elsewhere?
Reddit can be a great place, and though r/writers is generally a big circlejerk, there are smaller communities that are business-focused and informative. Have a look through the different subreddits and read some of the latest posts and see if you vibe with what people talk about in there. You can probably find one that is specific to your genre, which is extra handy for swapping tips or commiseration pertaining to your specific niche.
(If you’re self-publishing erotica or romance, r/eroticauthors and r/romanceauthors are great subreddits with lots of business-focused information. They’re less ‘writing accountability’ and more talking shop about the indie experience, but both really great groups!)
Another great resource for community and feedback is Critique Circle. This site is where I started out with trading critiques back when I was super new to the self pub scene, and it was an invaluable resource for me, not only helping to shape my writing knowledge but also making connections with like-minded writers.
The basic gist is that you critique others’ work and gain points, which you can then spend to post your own work for critique. Your work shows up in a queue categorized by genre for everyone on the site to see. There’s a deadline for critiques to be finished, and you can log in and see them at any time. Users can choose whether they want to do an inline critique (my favourite!) or just a general one, but the quality is important because you get to rate their effort level. If a user leaves a low effort critique and gets rated badly enough times, then they aren’t allowed to post their own work anymore, so there is huge incentive to give good and thoughtful critiques.
I find giving critique to be just as valuable for honing writing skill as receiving, and IMO every writer should participate in critique swaps regularly!
Lastly, this list wouldn’t be complete without Substack! The Notes area has the same vibe as writer Twitter except it’s not toxic and ruled by an evil overseer. The majority of Substack users are writers or readers, or at the very least creative people, all looking to cheer each other on! Interact with some people and see if you can’t find the promised land of writer groups that you’re looking for!
