DigiWriMo: An Interview with the Founders

This year, Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris of Marylhurt University conceived of Digital Writing Month to run concurrently with—and complementary to—NaNoWriMo. They are offering DigiWriMo to their students and would-be students, as well as any other writers who wish to join, as a way to acquaint themselves with the oddity and magic of digital writing.

The word-count goal is the same as that of NaNoWriMo, but the delivery of those words is entirely different. Rather than asking people to write novels, they’re encouraging them to create texts of many kinds, all located somehow upon, within, and in relationship with the web.

What inspired you to start Digital Writing Month?

Sean: Digital Writing Month started with a quick phone call from Jesse. He said: “I think we need to do another online course. I think it should be like NaNoWriMo.” I thought he was crazy, and at first, I didn’t see how you could make something like NaNoWriMo happen online.

For starters, there’s nothing like NaNoWriMo anywhere else; and the idea of hosting it like a course online just boggled my mind. Heck, it boggled my mind until even just a couple of days ago!

Jesse: After working on an open online course targeted mostly at teachers and academics (MOOC MOOC), we wanted to create something that was aimed at a much more diverse group of people. Most formal attempts at online learning adhere too much to a very conventional notion of what a class is.

Through our experiments, we’re hoping to find ways to re-imagine what a class is, how it’s shaped, the learning that happens in it, who sits at the head of it, how people interact within it, what the output is, etc. We love the NaNoWriMo format, so we were inspired by what Wrimos concoct every November to make writing fun and experimental.

Digital Writing seems to change the way we write. Do you think it changes the way we read as well?

Sean: I think absolutely. I think there’s a lot more skimming that happens when we read online; but I also think that we learn to scan information for its relevance much more quickly than we do in print. We read for subtext during Twitter exchanges; we read for images on Tumblr and Facebook; and we browse information in a dynamic way that’s never been possible before.

Jesse: I love what Sean says here about skimming. What the Internet lacks in depth it makes up for it by having a good deal more surface. Digital writing harnesses this broad surface by emphasizing collaboration, networks, and communal context.

How, in your opinion, has digital writing affected traditional forms of writing?

Jesse: I hear, like an incessant refrain, this notion that the internet is ruining us as readers and writers—that tools like Twitter and text-messaging are doing irreparable harm to our writing practices, our attention to detail, and (especially) our use of grammar. I believe strongly that we are becoming better readers and writers, because we are doing so much more reading and writing, and because, increasingly, we are doing that work together and for a much larger audience.

Sean: I want to make clear that Digital Writing Month never takes the stand that “print is dead”. Instead, we want to show that digital writing can be an additional creative outlet for the world’s authors.

I’m still very much a fan of paper books, while at the same time, I believe that online writing allows for a kind of energy and synergy that we’re only beginning to understand. I know that digital writing, in what way it can, has shown up in our for-print writing—you see the texts of e-mails, text messages, and more in novels today—but digital writing is a lot more than just the medium upon which its coded, and a lot more than the types of writing we do there.

Digital writing is active, unpredictable, and living in ways that print writing usually isn’t  It’s also impermanent, unedited, and sometimes too immediate in ways that print writing doesn’t have to be.

Since digital writing is so intrinsically tied to communication, it seems hard to opt out of digital writing as a genre without opting out of web-based communication entirely. Would you say this is true? And does it create problems for writing in general?

Jesse: To opt out of web-based communication is becoming a rather extreme choice—a choice that has great implications for our personal and professional lives. For example, many people use Facebook as a sort of constant and ever-present family reunion. If I’m not on Facebook, I’m choosing not to show up for the family reunion.

For me, Twitter is like a non-stop professional conference. There is an important conversation happening there, and if I’m absent from that space, I’m missing out on that conversation. The ubiquity of these tools means that we are becoming better and better at creating textual communities for ourselves to inhabit. These tools are also blurring the boundaries between our personal and professional lives.

Sean: I would add only that I don’t believe digital writing is a genre, as we understand genre. There’s something much more unpredictable going on in digital writing. I think it’ll be awhile before we fully understand it the way we do traditional writing.

Do you have any web-writerly influences? 

Jesse: I’m a big fan of Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic or Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. He manages to make something beautiful of the endless parade of otherwise mundane text we find on the web.

Some of my favorite blogs come from Teo Bishop and Bonnie Stewart. Teo understands how to create conversations on the web. Blogging, for him, is about dialogue—about making himself just “another inquisitive voice in the crowd.” What I admire so much about Bonnie’s work is how layered it is. Her blogs tell stories that reveal themselves over time, very personal stories, which she is both writer and reader of. And even as one of her stories ends, another begins. “I do not like declarations of done-ness,” she writes. “I cannot run out of paper, here.” I actually wept when I first read those lines. 

Another of my favorite bits: Pete Rorabaugh writes, “the act of writing is organic and generative.” For him, digital space does not get in the way of organic writing but actually helps cultivate this kind of work. Finally, more than any other writers, I admire my students. Over the years that I’ve been teaching digital composition, these are the authors I’ve come to know best—the authors I’ve connected with most directly. Recently, two of my students, Carrie Padian and Lans Nelson, had work published in a lovely analog book of poetry written in computer code, code {poems}. 

Sean, you also mentioned that you are a three-time winner, five-time participant of NaNo. What are your best tips to completing your NaNo novel?

Sean: There came a time when I found myself teaching my last creative writing course. It was a sad thing for me. And so during my very last class session, I wanted to tell these ambitious young writers something that might last, something that might motivate them to keep writing for the rest of their lives.

What I told them was this: “Don’t believe anyone.” Writers are constantly being told that what they do isn’t good enough, that they haven’t written something the “right” way, to the highest fictional standards. A lot of the time, writers give themselves these messages. And I say, don’t believe them. Don’t believe you’re not good enough. Don’t believe you’re not doing it right. Don’t believe you need to start over and begin again. And certainly don’t believe that you shouldn’t be writing.

When I’ve done NaNoWriMo, I’ve written some very interesting stuff, some I probably wouldn’t share, but that I’m very proud of anyway. Some of that writing is brilliant. Some of it is clearly experimental. But all of it is writing and all of it is worthwhile. As a NaNo novelist sitting down to the page every day, I reminded myself not to listen to all the voices of doubt and indecision and criticism, and to just write. Write because I love to write, because for an hour a day I could afford to give myself something wonderful, self-indulgent, and hopeful.

Jesse: NaNoWriMo teaches writers something very important about practice, about how to make writing an integral part of the day, and how to build an attention to that work into everything else we do. It also makes writing a communal act, creating a space for Sean and I to converse about writing practice across discipline and genre.

We’re curious to know how homework amnesty for NaNoWriMo participants in your creative writing courses played out. It sounds like a great incentive!

Sean: Yes. One year, I offered my Intro to Creative Writing students the opportunity to participate in NaNoWriMo in lieu of their regularly-scheduled homework. Students, of course, love the idea of homework amnesty; but the truth is, a lot of my students who chose the NaNoWriMo option for November ended up asking for the regular homework. NaNoWriMo was more challenging than other college assignments! NaNoWriMo is pretty intense homework, especially for college students who, early in December, faced final exams and final papers.

For those who did take up the challenge, though, I held a couple of class days that were simply “write-ins”, where we all sat around together, ate donuts, and wrote. During class, we talked about the problems they were having with pacing, characterization, rising action, etc. Writing a novel is bigger work than most creative writing classes call for, and so our time in class reflected writerly work on a much larger scale.

I followed my students progress on the NaNoWriMo site, too, and kept up with their word counts. Those who completed their novels just had to show me their NaNoWriMo winners certificate to receive credit for their work that month. By the time November 30th rolled around, all the NaNo novelists had learned something they never thought they’d learn in college, and not just about writing! They learned they had the stamina and creativity (and insanity) to see through to the end a really unique, large-scale project.

So, to get back to your first question about why we’re undertaking Digital Writing Month, I guess you could say we want to give writers a massive sort of homework amnesty, a free and open space to explore their writing. We’ve upped the ante a little by putting the whole thing in a digital context, but we’re sure there are plenty of folks up to the challenge.

Jesse Stommel is the Director of the Marylhurst University English and Digital Humanities degree program, the home of Digital Writing Month. He is also the co-founder and managing editor for Hybrid Pedagogy, an online journal of teaching and technology.

Sean Michael Morris is the Director of Educational Outreach for Hybrid Pedagogy, and a part-time faculty member with Marylhurst’s English and Digital Humanities degree program. He’s also a three-time NaNoWriMo winner, a former creative writing teacher, and the “Head Hare-brain” behind Digital Writing Month.