National Novel Generation Month, or NaNoGenMo, started in 2013 from an off-hand idea by the internet artist and programmer Darius Kazemi. A spoof of National Novel Writing Month, it challenges participants to spend November writing computer code that generates a novel rather than writing one by hand. The community runs in the open on GitHub, where people post both their generated novels and the source code that produced them.
The rules are deliberately loose. As the project site puts it, “Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words,” and “The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end.” The definition of “novel” is left wide open: “It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word ‘meow’. It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg.” Early entries used Markov chains, scraped text, and procedural tricks; in later years participants increasingly reached for neural language models, making the contest an informal timeline of how machine text generation evolved.
The spirit is exploratory and often comic rather than commercial - the point is the experiment, not a publishable book.
Why business readers should care: NaNoGenMo is a reminder that “computers writing prose” was a hobbyist curiosity for years before large language models made it a business question, and the contest’s open, code-sharing ethos stands in sharp contrast to today’s closed, monetized text generators.