For 25 years, writers knew that November meant writing a novel. Or at least 50,000 words of one.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, was an internet challenge where writers would attempt to write a 50,000-word novel (or 50,000 words of a novel, even if it wasn’t complete) over the 30 days of November. But in 2025, the nonprofit who organized the annual event announced that they were dissolving.

Despite the end of an organized event, many writers have continued the tradition as an informal November novel-writing challenge. In this issue, we’re seeing what writers on Medium are doing, and what advice they can give for those who want to challenge themselves, too.

NaNoWriMo got me through more Seasonal Affective Disorder blips than therapy ever did.

— Lacey in Self Publishing Adventures, I Still Need NaNoWriMo — Even If It No Longer Exists

Finding your challenge

“The idea of writing a novel (approximately 50,000 words or 1,667 words per day) during the month of November isn’t going anywhere,” writes Daley W. in Worldbuilding Wednesday. “In fact, new communities and platforms have taken up the cause in the wake of the NaNoWriMo shutdown.”

While the end of NaNoWriMo meant the end of the formal, singular challenge, the writing community around it has since banded together. A number of organizations and communities have started their own versions of it, and for 2026 Daley shares three potential options:

• Novel November by editing tool ProWritingAid, which follows the same basic challenge as NaNoWriMo (50,000 words over the course of the month);
• Worldember by tabletop game and world-building site World Anvil, which challenges would-be builders to create 10,000 words of worldbuilding writing on their platform;
• The November Novel Challenge from WritingHabit allows users to make their own custom word count for the month to avoid the massive 50,000-word goal.

In the publication Friends of National Novel Writing Month, former Medium employee Julie Russell writes about a new challenge organized by Chris Baty, the original founder of NaNoWriMo: NaNo 2.0. Like other challenges, NaNo 2.0 is much more flexible than the original, allowing writers to right-size their novel-writing month; Russell, for example, writes, “This November, I want to get to know this one character. Precisely how I‘ll get to know her will be the mystery.” The organization features a new-for-2026 customizable word count tracker.

Although the NaNoWriMo site is now offline, there are still lots of resources for writers unsure of what to do. The original resources can be found on the Internet Archive; more formal events like ProWritingAid’s Novel November offer workshops. And Medium writers who have taken this journey have plenty of advice for you, like lessons for getting through the middle of a novel from Felicia C. Sullivan or making sure you don’t artificially limit yourself by dismissing certain genres from Joshua Grasso. (Check out the Novel Writing topic page for more advice).

But the most important thing to keep in mind, as Shelby Sullivan writes, is: “If you make it to the end, you win.”

We can be so thrilled with our own created world, our characters or our prose that we presume the reader will be equally engrossed. There is no sure test for the quality of our hook.

Perhaps the best test comes by employing a range of honest readers who are prepared to risk wounding us by saying whether or not they would bother reading on.

— James Parsons in Never Stop Writing, Your Opening Chapter Isn’t Just About a Hook

What happens next

The point of challenges like NaNoWriMo and Novel November are to simply get you in the habit of writing. But actually getting the words down is only the first step.

“Yep, after finally writing it, you still have a lot more work to do,” writes David Graham in Story Maniacs.

He recently published his first novel, but it was “a very difficult and up-and-down journey” to get there. The first and maybe most important lesson he has for aspiring novelists: “I had learned how to write a novel, which was why my stories were always being praised, but I hadn’t learned how to edit one.” Graham took courses, hired professional copyeditors, and worked with beta readers who did not know him to get his novel to the point where it could be published.

“Overcoming writer’s block is hard at any time,” writes Jemma Pollari in the Writing Cooperative, “but especially when you’re trying to make the manuscript ‘better.’” She suggests asking yourself some hard questions when you’re stuck, like “Is the scene boring, even to you?”

“Here’s what no one told me,” Attila Vágó writes in a retrospective on his first novel. “From writing the first words to going live on Amazon in paperback format, it took over four years. Not the writing. That took the least amount of time. Everything else took a lot longer.”

So as you finish up your challenge, bask in the achievement — but if you’re aiming to actually publish your novel, know that there’s still lots of work to do. Thankfully, you’re not alone, and can learn from other novel writers on next steps. Good luck!

A final thought

If you can’t let go of your feeds, don’t just call it “doomscrolling;” instead, think of it as “information anxiety.” Psychiatrist Jud Brewer MD PhD recently wrote about “that restless, compulsive need to know everything that’s happening, to stay informed, to learn as much as they can, coupled with the distress that comes from actually trying to do so.”

This information gathering was once an evolutionary advantage, but can be crippling in the era of constant, never-ending news feeds. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but to start Brewer suggests you start evaluating yourself:

What triggers you to check the news? (Boredom? Anxiety? First thing in the morning?) What happens in your body and mind after you’ve spent time consuming news? How do you feel after a session of doom-scrolling versus when you’ve had a news-free day? What’s the actual impact on your sleep, productivity, and relationships?

Find your information sweet spot.

Up for the challenge? Check out the NaNoWriMo or Novel Writing topic pages for more information.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

The new generation of November novel writing was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Did you know that Japan has multiple bloodsucking demon myths, including the half-woman, half-snake Nure-onn? Or that in Ethiopia, a bloodsucking sorcerer known as a bouda is thought to be able to transform into a monstrous hyena? Or that among certain Muslim Romani villages in Kosovo in the 1930s, it was believed that pumpkins could become vampires?

There’s a chill in the air and it’s not just the weather. Halloween is this weekend — an excellent time to revisit horror’s place in our culture. In this issue, we take a look at the genre’s impact on Medium writers, from worldwide myths to low-budget movies.

While the fictional Dracula struck fear in the hearts of his victims, Vlad was, literally, running a huge poles through those hearts. And this sadist relished every moment of his depravity.

— Ds Traylor in Mythology Journal, The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler

Learning from blood-suckers

“The change was said to occur if they were kept for more than ten days after harvest,” James Cheney writes. “At that point, the pumpkins would begin to stir, shaking and making a sound, described in the oral accounts as a low, rolling rumble. Sometimes, even a drop of blood would appear on its rind.”

Cheney’s publication, The Night Visitor Chronicles, showcases all things vampires — and not just ones inspired by Bram Stoker. Almost every culture on Earth has a legend about a blood-sucking monster (with some prominent exceptions), and often those stories can tell us more about the cultures they come from.

For example, in the 1970s a Slavic researcher claimed that recent Kashub immigrants in Wilno, Ontario, were opening graves and beheading the dead. The “vampire-slaying in rural Ontario” became a media sensation in the Canadian papers. But beyond the tabloids is the story of a displaced people bringing their culture to a new home:

The traditions themselves, from the vjesci crossing the Atlantic to the caul being ground and given to a child on their seventh birthday just as it would have been done in Kashubia, are worth considering. It’s one of the most striking examples I know of how deep vampire belief runs, and how human beings cling to the stories that help them make sense of the world.

For all their dark and less than sensitive sides, there’s something about 80s slashers that make you want to raid your local 7-Eleven’s candy and Jiffy Pop stash, sink into the nearest cavelike dwelling (with a couch), and press play.

— Brandon Lennan in The Ugly Monster, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — Love Letter to 80s Slashers and Queer Freedom

Raising the dead

In 1997, Loren Kantor was hired to be in the props and art department during the three-day shoot of a low-budget zombie horror film. Two problems:

1. Kantor had never worked on a film before.
2. The film was starring actor John Carradine, who actually passed away a decade earlier.

In Three Days on a Zombie Horror Film, Kantor recounts the misadventures from a truly undead shoot, from a script written around Carradine’s pre-recorded dialogue to snake handling. On the second day, Kantor was charged with creating the set for the film’s climax: “a horde of naked female vampire zombies rise from their graves and attack the mafia bosses responsible for their un-deaths.” That, of course, meant he was literally digging graves:

At sundown, the prop man checks my progress. He’s incensed at my slow pace. “What’s your problem, buddy? You’re moving like a four-year old girl.”

“I’ve never dug graves before,” I tell him.

“You’re going to be digging your own grave if you don’t start hustling.”

The shoot is a comedy of errors. Blood and mood are everywhere — he even has to wear a zombie suit after his clothing gets soaked on the final day, and the cash he’s paid in is covered in dried blood.

In the comments, Kantor writes that the movie was released “but I never saw it.” Instead, after the shoot, he got some much-needed sleep.

But have you ever wondered if you were in a horror movie, would you survive? Like, is there one monster or villain who you know you could take in a one-on-one fight? I’ve been thinking about this, and I am pretty certain that there are some villains I could take on if I found myself confronted by them.

— Nick Howard in Hot List Energy, Horror Villains, I’m Pretty Sure I Can Take In a Fight

Spooky stories

Halloween is always a prime time to revisit some horror. On October 29, Medium will be hosting an online Spooky Storytime that you can sign up for here — but if you want some chills and thrills before then, the Medium community has you covered.

Medium is host to a wide range of original horror fiction. In Evan Purcell’s Death Squirrel: A Gay Horror Story, a man meets Death next to his partner’s hospital bed. A loner comes over for a meal with some people who may be just like them in LeonineLibra’s Sweeter than Most. Red Mist Morning by Chantelle Atkins describes a mysterious red mist that overcomes a small Georgia town. A publisher learns the dark secret behind his former schoolmate’s writing in Marc Barham’s The Devil is Always in the Detail.

More interested in finding something to watch instead? Publications like The Ugly Monster feature culture writing specifically about horror; use them as starting off points for conversations about everything from the film Backrooms to the remake of the video game Dead Space.

You can also find some real-life horror on Medium as well. Kathleen Murphy shares the “true” story that inspired The Exorcist: the 1948 exorcism of a Missouri teen boy by Jesuit priests. Or you could read about how Kim Fedyk discovered that she lived next door to an urban legend hotspot, Whitby Psych.

Whatever you are looking for this spooky season, the best place to start is the Horror topic. Happy Halloween!

A final thought

Social scientist Katie Jagielnicka asks an uncomfortable question: Do men need daughters to see women as human? She writes about some research that suggests there’s a kernel of truth to this:

It’s an exhausting, time-consuming, and frequently futile game women are forced to play to convince men to see us as full human beings when we’re not personally meaningful to them. Sometimes, even when we are.

Just imagine, though, a world in which we didn’t have to do any of that, or invent hypothetical scenarios to persuade humans to treat one another as such.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Pumpkin vampires and (un)dead actors was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over ten years ago, Medium user Naveen wrote a story about wanting a dark mode to better read stories on Medium, especially at night. (In classic Medium writer style, he designed a prototype himself and wrote about his process!)

It was a great idea back in 2015, and since then, many other writers have taken to Medium to share their frustrations, experiences, and possible solutions for dark mode, not to mention the hundreds of readers who have sent in support tickets requesting it.

Just one short decade later (!), we are happy to finally release dark mode on Medium. We hope it helps you enjoy more of the stories you read.

Special thanks to the Medium users who submitted feedback to us: Pham Ba Tho, Michael Hagan, Alexeyprog (Алексей Крайст), Sarmakalem (Çağla Demir), Artyomkey (lolwho), Julitop 55 (Julio Banda), Timtom7of9 (Popollux), Notbrain (Brian Ross), Mukhammed Sailaubek (Mukhammed), Tmg40 (D.L. White), Limeauthority (Liam McDonnell), lizporter2019 (Liz Porter), Wink (Wink Saville), Harishk3493 (Harish K).

How does it work?

If you already have dark mode turned on in your computer’s system settings, you should just be able to come to Medium.com and have it be in dark mode automatically — we’ll respect whatever your system’s settings are!

If you want to manually set Medium to dark mode, just head over to your Settings > Profile > Appearance > Toggle to Dark.

Any questions, issues, or feedback? Here’s where to let us know.

Behind the scenes

How did a decade-old request finally make it to users? We had a pretty full roadmap already, with reposting, the Editor Partner Program, AI opt-out, off-topic badges, table of contents, publication calendars, and more.

We’ve had lots of passionate engineers and designers over the years that have wanted to tackle dark mode. This year, Christine Leverett found the space and the leverage with Claude Code to start building dark mode on her own in February 2026 between other projects.

We knew it was going to be a hit (it has consistently been one of our top three most-requested changes). Once there was momentum, the rest of the team picked it up and got it across the line in September.

If you want the longer story, Christine wrote up the whole process here, including how she used Claude Code to manage scoping/ticketing, the guardrails that kept it from scope creep, and what’s next on our dark mode roadmap.

Dark mode for Medium is finally here was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“As far as I could tell, my parents made the world,” writes Allisonn Church. They were major do-it-yourself-ers, handling everything from repairs to Halloween costumes and decorations with their own bare hands. Her childhood was filled with memories of working on projects together.

“All things considered, my do-it-yourself story is more of a do-it-together story in the end,” Church writes. “Lucky me! I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Lucky for us, there’s a thriving scene of DIYers on Medium to help us go out and create things in the physical world together instead of spending all our time online — like decorations, crafting supplies, even LEGOs. In this issue, we’re sharing some interesting recent projects that you can do at home.

Let’s get building.

For me, the heart of DIY is having control over an idea.

— Danny Edmunds, DIY Isn’t Dead. It’s Ready for a Comeback.

Lessons from a fixer-upper

When Jason DeCourcy Barefoot and his wife purchased a fixer-upper apartment back in 2021, he was inspired by decades of home improvement television shows. His wife was less sure.

Years later, at the precipice of moving on to a new apartment, DeCourcy Barefoot looks back at their home improvement projects like building shelving units, redoing the bathroom, and updating the fireplace. But the most important lesson they learned was how to be a team.

“It forced us into the right kind of collaboration,” he writes, “the kind where you have to trust each other, laugh at your mistakes, divide roles honestly, and learn when to step back and let the other person’s strengths lead.”

Programming a haunted house

Halloween is coming soon, and by his own admission, writer Anže Kravanja is not particularly artistic. Beautiful jack-o-lanterns might be out of the question for his home — but he does know how to code. “So, I asked myself the classic programmer’s question,” he writes, “‘What can I control with a computer in my house?’”

Using a web camera, smart lightbulbs, and an API to link it all together, he created a house who spoke to treat or treaters and eventually became a “digital poltergeist.” See how he put it together.

Homemade arts

“My curiosity is always piqued when I realize that I might be able to make something instead of buying it,” writes Celeste Wilson in The DIY Diaries. “It may not always work out, but I have fun trying.”

When she found someone who was selling homemade watercolor paints, she decided to find a way to make them herself. After much trial and error, she shares her recipe, which can be made with items commonly found around a kitchen, but she encourages experimentation. “Play around with it,” she writes. “See what works.”

These days, I’m doing my best to see the “good” that comes from “negative” experiences like these. In other words, what are they trying to teach me? What lessons do I need to learn from them?

— Patrice Walker in The DIY Diaries, An “Imperfect” Cat Bed Leads To Some Important Lessons

LEGOs for learning

LEGOs are the ultimate DIY toy. It doesn’t matter if you buy a big box of parts or a specialized kit — you will always need to put it together. Attila Vágó’s publication, Bricks n’ Brackets, combines the iconic bricks with engineering fundamentals. For example:

• His recent piece on LEGO blind boxes shares how they can teach kids the fundamentals of mechanics: “44 pieces of fun and learning for the price of a coffee!”
• A review of the late-90s LEGO Barcode Computer showed how this basic form of programming inspired an entire generation of engineers and software developers.
• Vágó built a demonstration of synesthesia (where stimulating one sense leads to the sensation of another, such as associating certain letters with colors) using LEGO bricks and QR codes.

Check it out for some engineering-brained projects.

A tiny ecosystem

Armando Rodrigues is fascinated by enclosed terrariums, or miniature gardens that are created inside glass. He finds the most interesting thing about them is just how self-sufficient they can be.

“You do not need expensive equipment, rare plants or much experience with gardening,” he writes. “In fact, one of the things I like most about them is how much room there is for experimentation. Every terrarium I build ends up looking and behaving slightly differently.”

Armando shares how to build one, including a good soil composition and how to pick out the right plants.

Upcycling a chest

When Michael Rhodes and his wife were newlyweds in Japan, budgets were extremely tight — so they became experts in the art of low-cost, DIY furniture. He shares how he used two Chabako (boxes used to ship Japanese tea) he found for less than $20 as a wooden chest.

“They made beautiful rustic-looking storage boxes, which we use to this day and which made nice end tables some 45 years ago,” he writes. He’s so pleased with the results that he’s even purchased more for his current home, even adding brass hardware to give it a sleeker look. Learn more about them.

A final thought

John Kruse MD, PhD is a psychologist, so he often works with patients who have invisible illnesses, or diseases that don’t have any outwardly visible symptoms. These diseases can be deadly — Kruse points out that many “silent killers,” such as hypertension, diabetes, or infections like tertiary syphilis, don’t actually manifest symptoms until it’s very late in the process.

They’re also often exacerbated because they are invisible, especially if you’re speaking to a doctor that does not know what your baseline level of health is, so they do not listen when a patient says something is wrong. He calls these “inaudible illnesses:”

From my own experiences, and those related by my patients, I think that some strategies can lessen the likelihood of inaudible illness.

- build a relationship with your primary care provider

- see your doctor more frequently

- bring a bullet list of items you want to discuss

- ask for eye contact

- explain what kind of observer/reporter you are

- try to keep channels of communication open

- work to improve our health care systems

The better you know your doctor, and your doctor knows you, the higher the level of satisfaction and the quality of care.

This issue is just a sample of the many, many projects that aspiring DIYers can try out on Medium. Check out the DIY, Crafting, and Home Improvement stories for more, or check out publications like The DIY Diaries or Bricks n’ Brackets. Happy building!

Big news: TK, Medium’s new app that supports all aspects of the writing process, is now available for free all Medium members! Test it out now and let us know what you think.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

“DIY isn’t dead.” was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, we discussed the findings in Medium’s 2026 State of Writing Report, including the rise of AI tools that writers have been using as part of their process. This week, we wanted to dig deeper into the why.

We grabbed some time with Medium’s Scott Lamb, about the impetus behind the report, its findings, and where writing might go from here.

Writing is an act of compression, while my thoughts naturally expand outward through association.

— Varyanne Sika, The Anatomy of a Rabbit Hole: How Reading Oscar Wilde Changed the Way I Think About Thinking

A tumultuous time for writing

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Medium Newsletter: Why did you commission a State of Writing Report? Why at Medium was it important to do this pulse check?

Medium VP of Content Scott Lamb: It’s just an unbelievably tumultuous time for writing right now. The Internet is changing so quickly with the advent of AI-powered tools. It’s changing the way that Medium works. It’s changing the way that people find stories and the way that people create stories. We wanted to go deeper than what we’ve been reading in coverage from other places and get firsthand data — not just in the Medium community, but beyond. We wanted to get a representation of writers at large, wherever they may be doing their work.

Given The Harris Polls’ reputation and their long standing authority in the space, they just seemed like a great fit. They were super excited to help us put it together.

MNL: We discussed this in last week’s newsletter, but one of the most interesting findings is that 71% of writers use AI tools in some part of the process. These tools are everywhere — for example, we’re using a transcription service to record this interview. Was that finding surprising to you?

Lamb: I was surprised. I feel like I shouldn’t have, given the conversation around AI is sort of omnipresent.

MNL: And yet the survey found we’re seeing more writing overall. In the report, you called it a “private writing revival” because so much of this writing is actually happening privately now, versus people publishing publicly. Why do you think that is? Or do you think it was always this way?

Lamb: I think it’s probably safe to say that private writing has always been a relatively big part of how people write. Journaling, keeping a diary, writing drafts that never see the light of day — we know from just looking at Medium’s data that there’s a huge number of unpublished drafts on the site.

But the other thing that we are seeing — and this has been a trend pre-AI — is that there has been a retreat from the public internet. People are taking writing to WhatsApp groups, text threads, or other shared safe spaces. And I think that AI is just fueling that already existing dynamic where people don’t want to be putting out thoughts that in two or three years time will come back to haunt them.

Curation is a cop-out.

— Nicole Alexandra Michaelis in UX Collective, The taste paradox: why the skill everyone says matters is the one we’ve stopped building

The private writing revival

MNL: Was this trend of writing entering more private spaces instead of writing in public the impetus behind TK?

Lamb: Definitely, but I think also a big part of TK was that we just wanted to make writing easier for people in some way. We wanted to find a space where we could just lower the bar for entry.

MNL: Do you think some of this blurring of the lines between writing and being a capital-W Writer is part of why we’re seeing this revival?

Lamb: I believe everyone is a writer. I was at a public event a couple of months ago and just asked for a show of hands: “How many people in the audience consider themselves writers?” And two or three people raised their hands. Then I said: “Well, how many of you have written something in the last day or so, from an email to a text? How many of you have done the act of writing a notebook?” Obviously, everyone’s hands go up.

One of the primary ways that we understand the world is through reading. And one of our primary ways of expressing our ideas is through writing. That’s a very core human activity.

The best thing you can do, to improve your writing, is to read it aloud while you’re working on it.

— Susan Orlean in The Medium Handbook, The Simplest Way to Improve as a Writer

The future of writing

MNL: Do you have any predictions about what you’ll find in the 2027 State of Writing Report?

Lamb: I assume that AI as a tool people are using in a lot of the writing and reading is going to continue. I hope that the thing that we’re talking about in 2027 is more clarity and disclosure about how and when those tools have been used. You know, “Here’s my statement of how I use AI and how AI shows up in my work.”

I hate the idea that people are going to start writing to AI. I mean changing their voice to avoid AI detection or to avoid sounding like AI. That was something that showed up in this report already. It was a real bummer to see that some folks that we spoke with have lost confidence in their writing and that their voice has changed based on AI.

The other thing I’ll be really curious about: Where are we seeing more positive use cases? We have a lot of really AI-skeptical writers on Medium who are, for good reason, mad about how their writing has been stolen by these companies and used for training. But we’ve had some examples on TK, which has some AI components in it, where some folks in the Medium community who’ve been pretty outspoken about AI in general use TK and have a moment of, “Oh, maybe I have this project that I want to work on, and I have 50 essays on Medium that speak to it. I want to understand some of the through lines.”

And I’m really hopeful that a year from now, there are going to be a lot more of those types of use cases and a lot less focus on people just using AI to generate writing whole cloth. That seems like the most boring and least valuable possible use.

Why bother doing that? There’s a lot more interesting work to be done in the world.

A final thought

On the topic of losing confidence in your writing, we wanted to share this recent piece by Jahde Vaccani. She argues in Writelicious that writer’s block isn’t actually real, but instead a signal that maybe what we’re writing isn’t in the right direction, or has been complicated by our feelings. She writes:

Your writing isn’t great yet. Tell me — how many years did you study to get where you are? From school to graduation, post-graduation, and the years of work experience? How do you go from being an intern to a senior? Yes, it takes time. And this time changes from person to person. Never compare yourself. We’ll always take the time needed for things to be just right, in their place, and as great as they can be. There’s absolutely no shortcut.

Interested in more thinking on writing? Check out the Writing topic to read fellow Medium writers on this “core human” craft.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

“Writing is a core human activity.” was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Writing is in flux. We wanted to know what actual writers thought of those changes.

On Medium Day, we shared the 2026 State of Writing Report. It’s a comprehensive survey of more than 1,100 writers conducted in collaboration with the Harris Poll to get a pulse check on the craft. What we found is that despite what some say, writing isn’t dead; it’s more in a moment of change.

For the next few issues, we’re going to be a bit meta and discuss writing itself, right now, in the year 2026. There are some fascinating findings that we want to share with you. Let’s discuss.

Write because one person will stumble on your work and feel something about it, about you, and the hope is the beauty you’ve given them is a kind of beauty they bring into their life, share with the world.

— Felicia C. Sullivan in Feeling Crafty, Your Writing Matters

The eleph-AI-nt in the room

No conversation about writing in 2026 can happen without discussing the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Readers fear they are drowning in AI-generated content. In the State of Writing Report, a third of all writers think that most of what they read online is written by AI.

“This is AI” is becoming such a common comment on all writing, editor of The Daily Draft Matt Lillywhite has taken to giving commenters nicknames like AI Detective Dylan.

But, much like how drowning famously doesn’t actuall look the way TV and movies would have you believe, Lillywhite argues that common truisms about AI detection are usually false. AI detectors are often incorrect; generous use of em-dashes or “a few metaphors” isn’t a reliable indicator of AI-generated writing.

Instead of trying to find secret codes and patterns that are AI-coded, Lillywhite argues, look at simple math. “A few months ago, I clicked through one creator’s archive and kept scrolling,” he writes. “By the time I reached the previous week, the word count was already somewhere near seven figures.”

Lillywhite argues that even the most prodigious writers work in starts and stops. It’s the consistent, high-volume output that’s the tell: “One article in the morning. Three more by lunch. And for good measure, about 300 LinkedIn posts in between,” he writes. “Then, I’d open my inbox the next day and discover they’d done it all over again.”

That’s the really key ingredient that all great writing has: it comes from a person, and that person is you.

— Zulie @ Medium in The Medium Handbook, How to grow an audience as a writer

More writing (with) TK

There’s a contradiction at the heart of the spirited cultural conversation around AI and writing. The 2026 State of Writing Report found:

• 71% of all writers have used AI tools in some part of the writing process.
• At the same time, writers themselves don’t trust the results, especially when they find that someone else used them (69% distrustful of other people’s use, vs. 60% distrustful of their own usage).

AI-assisted writing doesn’t look like tsunamis of writing with em-dashes, either. It actually just looks like… writing. Those 71% of writers are not necessarily using AI for generating writing, but assisting them — think grammar checks, getting feedback, and finding ideas; Lillywhite uses grammar and automatic transcription tools, for example.

The Medium team has been very thoughtful in how AI tools work with the platform. TK, Medium’s upcoming writing assistant tool, is a social writing platform that includes AI as more of a “writing coach” than a copy generator. “It’s there to prompt you to write, help you get unstuck, ask questions, and develop an idea, not generate your writing for you,” Kassandra @ Medium recently wrote.

The writers testing TK are finding it’s useful for keeping focus: Researching without clicking out of a writing tab; writing without distracting grammar and spelling indicators; using your voice to dictate a piece instead of trying to write it out.

Despite much consternation and anxiety about AI’s impact on writing, perhaps the most important finding in the State of Writing Report was how hopeful writers were on the artform. Half of writers feel as though their writing is getting better; 42% are more likely to feel positive about writing overall than negative.

Medium VP of content Scott Lamb has written how AI is making everyone a writer. This positive feeling about the state of writing confirms that we’re at the precipice of a writing revival.

A final thought

Writer Evan T. Haynos recently wrote an ode to the Chipotle of Rosslyn, Virginia that we recommend you read. Not because we particular crave fast-casual burritos, but because we should all appreciate the beauty in the little, mundane things in our lives

I long to recreate the 2-hour, 3-drink ad agency lunches they did in Mad Men, but that doesn’t exist right now or at least not for me. I live within the reality of my world, and it’s not surf & turf at a 12pm steakhouse meal in Georgetown with a Michelin Star. It’s a kid’s meal at a mega-chain with standardized portions in Arlington, Virginia.

“You don’t come here expecting The French Laundry,” Chef Sean Brock told Anthony Bourdain during his first trip to Waffle House. Brock’s right. Expectations matter, and finding joy when yours are low should be what we all search for — in food and in life.

Next week, we’ll continue our review of the State of Writing with Medium’s Scott Lamb and hear his thoughts on the “private writing revival.”

In the meantime, check out the Writing topic to see how Medium writers are thinking and talking about the craft.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Writers distrust AI, but love using it was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dreams are a near-universal human experience — but who are they actually for?

In a recent overview of James Hilman’s The Dream and the Underworld, Jack Preston King shares the argument that our dreams do not actually belong to us. Instead, Hillman argues, “our dream life is its own realm that exists in and for itself — a critical dimension of our fuller human existence that we betray when we apply interpretations that put our daytime ego front and center.”

Many Medium writers argue otherwise. In this issue, we take a look at a few of the ways in which the community thinks about dreams, and how they affect the version of us that are awake.

Dreaming is a scheduled process that, between one session and the next, makes the agent review its own memories, extract patterns, clean up what’s redundant or obsolete, update the rules by which it delegates. The agent stops merely executing and begins to observe itself.

— Fabio Lalli in Bootcamp, The agent that dreams, the company that watches

Our dream selves and butterflies

Emily Cook, PhD, a psychologist who has been writing on Medium on the subject, recently shared a story from the Zhuangzi in which its author, Zhuang Zhou, dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up, the book famously says, “he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt, he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.”

That idea might feel familiar, Cook argues, because she believes there’s a kernel of truth in it. While we are awake, we often have a very clear sense of self: who we are, what we like or dislike, and so on. But in dreams, she writes, “the solid character of ‘me’ crumbles. The thick black lines we draw around our edge, get a bit fainter.” In Cook’s own experience, “I have found my own dreams haunted by a second, other-me. I confront and challenge the interloper. Aware that she is in some way, also me. But unfamiliar and separate.”

This disconnection between the waking and dreaming self is a feature, not a bug (in fact, Cook calls it a “secret defense mechanism”). “Neuroscientists have known for decades that dreams play a special role in learning,” she writes. “The purpose of the dream is to combine what we’ve learned with what we already know. Both about the outside world, and about ourselves.”

This might be why during times of personal issues — like students starting a new semester or people dealing with a mental health emergency — dreams tend to get more intense. Cook suggests that it is this processing of new information and insight that make the dream versions of ourselves to be such strangers. “They are the loving author re-writing us, nightly, into existence.”

But of course, it would be silly of me to think that the dream would continue forever.

— Hashim Hazman in The Memoirist, When a Dream Comes True, a Fantasy Dies

The playfulness of lucid dreams

In Thought Thinkers, writer Eleni Stephanides shares that for her, dreams aren’t just for self improvement — it’s your brain writing “insane movies every night” and creating a safe place to experiment and play. She is a frequent lucid dreamer, or someone that realizes within a dream that they are dreaming. Some, like her, can even manipulate or change the dream with that knowledge.

“During lucid dreams, our brains show forms of self-awareness and reflection that aren’t present in ordinary dreaming,” she writes. “It’s estimated that more than half the population has experienced at least one lucid dream, though regular lucid dreaming is less common.”

Stephanides uses that self-awareness to her advantage: Calming down during nightmares, playing moments for comedy, enjoying a feast of foods that her real-life body has trouble processing. Sometimes the dreams don’t make sense (“’A’ for effort, brain,” she writes. “Tonight just wasn’t your night.”). Sometimes they are deep, emotional conversations with a family member. And although these moments may seem random, that’s by design.

“Not all dreams contain a hidden message. The subconscious is far from an infallible oracle,” she writes. “But I also don’t think not real means meaningless. The fear is real while it lasts. So are the grief, joy, and relief.”

All the dreams, whether they are random or not, are a place where you can find meaning, Stephanides argues:

Lucid dreams are where our minds wrestle with hope, loss, pain, and possibility. They let us test the limits of what we can face — and sometimes, let us rest from having to face anything at all.

So who are dreams for? They are for us — and how we take their messages is what we make of it.

A final thought

When we’re focusing on different points, our eyes do something called saccade where they move up to 700 times a second. To help our brains process these movements, our brains temporarily blind us and fill in the gaps from memory for a smoother visual experience, a process called saccadic masking. In Zenite, writer Furkan Bayram shares how he lost his ability to process these movements after a severe infection, leading to dizziness and nausea; he writes, “it felt as though Earth’s gravity had vanished and I was spinning in sync with the planet.”

He eventually made a full recovery, but the experience helped him gain a new perspective on life:

This concept mirrors the “mental blindness” we develop toward the transitional periods experienced while rapidly shifting between major life milestones and focal points — such as achievements, crises, and outcomes. We focus so intently on results that our brains erase the truly fascinating or instructive “moments of the leap” between those points — much like in saccadic masking — leaving us to take refuge in an illusion of continuity.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Do your dreams belong to you? was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s the numbers version of this recap:

• 15,000+ registrants from 172 countries
• 134 speakers, 122 sessions, 14 meetups
• 6.8k attendees
• 350 attendees who came to 9+ sessions! I admire your dedication.

And then there’s the Medium version of this recap, which is that it was a wonderfully special day in a way that transcends numbers.

Our readers get to listen, first-hand, to experts freely and generously share their knowledge and experience. Writers get a direct line to their own communities, and the opportunity to talk about their passions to a group of deeply interested listeners. And it’s the one day a year we, Medium employees, get to reconnect with huge swathes of our community, and hear directly from you why it’s all worth it.

What our community said

Overall, attendees felt inspired to read and write more.

I left more inspired and more inclined to write and read on Medium.

I feel more motivated to write.

Attendees, like me, were blown away by the incredible quality and breadth of knowledge speakers showcased.

Great day with amazing speakers.

Great insights and helpful direction

A great platform for engaging and learning connecting people from different cultures and background around the world.

It’s always a joy meeting new people and hearing new perspectives.

And one common theme? Looking forward to more community events like this. We’re right there with you.

I truly enjoyed participating in the Medium Day event; I attended at least five or six sessions, and they were genuinely valuable. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to the organisers, curators, writers, editors, and everyone else involved, because the event would not have been a success without your support. I am looking forward to more sessions like this. Thank you so much.

It was great to attend sessions of fellow writers. I also appreciated learning of new opportunities to share my life with readers. A few sessions that were especially valuable include 'The Real Reason ADHD Brains Can't Stop', 'Write Where it Hurts', Women Writing After 50' and the Medium 101 Webinar. Thank you for Medium Day. I plan to participate in the future.

Read more community highlights on the Medium Day 2026 topic page.

Medium Day Editor Award Winners

A special part of Medium Day was celebrating the Editor Awards. Editors give so much of themselves to the readers and writers here, and we loved having the opportunity to recognize just a few for their contributions to their communities on Medium.

Community Builder Award

For the editor who cultivates a supportive, collaborative environment across their team.

Winner: Rodrigo S-C, editor of Full Frame

Whether a writer has 10 subscribers or 50,000, this editor takes joy in helping them build something strong. The community they've built has grown into one of the best and strongest on Medium.

Equity in Action Award

For the editor who intentionally supports and amplifies underrepresented writers, helping ensure a broader range of perspectives are seen and heard across Medium.

Winner: Patsy Fergusson, editor of Fourth Wave

This editor championed unheard and outsider voices from around the globe — developmental editing, copy editing, and nurturing new voices all along the way.

Champion of Emerging Voices Award

For the editor who consistently uplifts newer or lesser-known writers.

Winner: Susan Brearley, editor of MuddyUm

This editor hosts free community writing groups and super affordable writing courses through their nonprofit. They turn away no one and see the potential in all of us — they’ve published an anthology of emerging writers and have three more in the works.

Story Whisperer Award

For the editor whose notes consistently uncover hidden potential in a piece.

Winner: Ali Hall, editor of Life Without Children

They are wonderfully encouraging and supportive of my work, adding in nuances that stimulate me to think more deeply about my own life.

Editor's Editor Award

For the editor other editors turn to for advice, second reads, or mentorship.

Winner: Debra Groves Harman, editor of The Narrative Arc

Their name has come up more than once from an editor saying, 'You should ask so-and-so about this.' If I have an essay I want extra care and attention on, I'll always share it with them first. They're the editor's editor, for sure.

Congratulations to all five, and thank you to everyone who submitted a nomination.

*One minor correction: during the Medium Day closing ceremonies, we incorrectly swapped the recipients of the Equity in Action Award and the Champion of Emerging Voices Award! The correct editors are stated above, and we emailed Susan Brearley and Patsy Fergusson to let them know about our mix-up.

Most-attended sessions

These were the sessions that had the most viewers.

Missed any? You can catch the recordings! Just head over to mediumday.com, log in, and watch any sessions on demand.

1. Medium Day 2026 Keynote, with Tony Stubblebine, Kassandra @ Medium, Scott Lamb, and Zulie @ Medium
2. Why every human should write a daily blog (and how to consistently do it), presented by Niklas Göke
3. Arguing about facts doesn't work: Why politics should be like couples therapy, presented by Andrew Anderson
4. 5 writing tools for getting unstuck, presented by Jeremy Caplan
5. Medium 101 Webinar, presented by Kassandra @ Medium
6. AI: Hype, reality & writing, presented by Mark Dranias and co-hosts Prutha, Su Myat Noe (ス), and Grace
7. Beyond aesthetics: How one story can become a creative ecosystem, presented by Ebony Walden
8. Making life's toughest decisions with clarity, presented by Mark Shrime, MD, PhD
9. Wordsmiths' Weekly: Writing in community, hosted by Susan Brearley
10. The psychology of writing: Getting to flow, presented by Carol Lennox. LPC, M.Ed.

Most-asked questions

Will these sessions be recorded?

• Yes! Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
• (In all seriousness: yes, unless the speaker requested the session not be! All sessions are available in the Zoom event at Mediumday.com for anyone who registered, and we’ll be uploading a selection to YouTube for further distribution.)

Where can I read Medium's State Of Writing Report?

• Here! https://medium.com/blog/mediums-state-of-writing-report-2026-a-private-writing-revival-107016e9e254

Where can I buy Medium merch?

• You can buy Medium merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/medium/

What Medium staff thought

I love my job, and I love Medium’s mission. I wouldn’t work here unless I truly believed that reading and writing makes the world better, a feeling I know is shared by all my colleagues. But it’s always such a treat to come to Medium Day and have that feeling coming to life. It fills all of our cups for the year to come — at least until next Medium Day.

A wrap on the best reading and writing day of the year

How do you explain Medium Day? I like to say it’s like a renewal of vows. Every person who attends gets reminded why they love reading and writing, and (hopefully) is inspired to read and write just a little bit more.

Honestly, being online can be kind of a bummer! There’s so much low-effort content being generated for eyeballs or a quick buck. It feels revolutionary to go to a gathering designed purely for discovery and community, based around our shared love of reading and writing.

Medium Day 2026 was our best one yet, but we can’t wait to see you all again for Medium Day 2027!

Here’s what stood out at Medium Day 2026 was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“As a modern human, I have become expertly trained to distract myself,” wrote janelle☆ in a recent post. She’s right; it’s never been easier to not be alone with your thoughts.

The International Telecommunication Union reports that, worldwide, 82% of all people above the age of 10 own a smartphone, and it’s affecting how we sit with ourselves. For Janelle, “A walk always needs to be paired with an acutely curated playlist,” she writes. “A meal must come with a reality show playing in the background while my thumb flickers through 5 different apps on the phone…. It’s like I have a phobia of complete silence.”

And even in the rare moments when we do have time to ourselves, we are constantly being interrupted — in the United States alone, those smartphones receive an average of 46 notifications a day. Sometimes, you just need to take a moment to breathe, and find the little moment of connection.

In this issue, we take a look at how three different Medium writers are doing just that.

If you hurry through the small things, you hurry through everything.

— Thomas Oppong, A Vietnamese Monk’s Secrets For Your Best Life

How to “not think”

For Janelle, in “the art of not thinking,” the answer for a too-busy mind was to simply not think. After a period of a particularly busy brain, she decided to “meditate properly” for the first time. But after a brief minute of mindfulness, things started to go awry:

Then, abruptly, I thought to myself, “This feels great. Why didn’t I do this sooner? If I did this when I was 7, I could have achieved a fully regulated nervous system by now! What a waste of time!”

This led to a full-minute sprint of every opportunity I had missed in the past, every version of me that could have existed if I were more hardworking, more talkative, more courageous.

We’re so used to being distracted, Janelle writes, that it can be hard to turn it off. Our minds are wired and full of distractions, she argues. Instead, you should think of your mind as a bedroom. “The room should not be completely empty,” she suggests. “It should contain what helps you rest.”

Instead of letting the loud things in our life take our attention — distractions, memories, notifications — Janelle writes that you should practice the art of letting it go. It’s impossible to stop your brain, she writes. Instead:

Let a thought pass through your mind,
observe it with full respect,
and politely ask it to leave so we can rest.

The garden revealed an invisible boundary around what I had allowed myself to want. It left me wondering: What would need to change in my thinking for me to imagine a truly beautiful and successful life?

— Inbar in Mystic Minds, I Used to Be Famous. Then I Learned to Hide

The tiger in the room

If given a choice, writer Daniel Williams would magically remove the anxiety from his brain in an instant. Williams has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. If you think of regular old fear as being afraid of a tiger, anxiety, as he describes it, “imagines tigers everywhere. Everything’s a potential tiger in anxiety’s eyes.”

It makes his career teaching literature all the more difficult. Classrooms are rife with opportunities for potential tigers; Williams’ biggest anxiety-inducing task on the job is reading aloud. The anxious often avoid the source of their anxiety, but thanks to rounds of cognitive behavioral therapy, Williams takes a different approach:

Cognitive behavioral therapy says, “You feel like there’s a tiger in the room?”

“Yes.”

“Stay in that room.”

“No.”

“Yes. Stay until you realize you haven’t been killed and eaten. You’re still alive. Therefore, maybe…”

“There… is no tiger?”

“Exactly.”

For Williams, just doing the thing he is anxious about and gathering evidence that it is not as life-ending as he thinks is enough to get him through those periods of fear. “Thank you for your vigilance,” he says to his anxious brain, “but this is a false alarm. Stand down.”

Luckily, the mind is a malleable thing, so it can change at any moment. And when the inside world — our story — changes, the outside world changes, too. That’s when a whole new myth can start playing out.

— Andy Murphy in The Academic, Carl Jung Warned: There Are Only Four Things to Worry About In Life

Thanks to the shadow, I am well

Niceties are a phenomenon that exist in every culture. When asked by an acquaintance How are you?, in most cultures people respond with a simple I am fine, and you?, even if the truth is a bit more emotionally complex. In Japanese, former language teacher KYO points out, the response to this greeting when talking to a stranger is “okagesama de.” Translated literally, she writes, it means “thanks to the honorable shadow, I am well”; the sentiment is “[b]ecause of you, things are going well. Because of you, I am fine.”

Kyo shares that the phrase started as a Buddhist expression, and it speaks to something deeper. Humans are in this together, but a simple I am fine ignores that cooperation. “Every life runs on invisible cooperation,” she writes. “The people who grew the rice, the stranger whose ordinary competence kept the train and the water and the year running, the friend who stayed healthy.” Okagesama de isn’t just an expression that things are well, but an acknowledgement that things are well because we are all in this together.

Every once in a while, Kyo suggests, you should make your appreciation known — and you don’t need to do it in Japanese. “Once in a while, answer how are you as if the question were real. Aim the thanks a little wider than the person standing in front of you, and see who it touches.”

This week, as you practice some mindfulness, don’t forget to share some gratitude.

A final thought

During Medium Day 2026 last Friday, we shared the 2026 State of Writing Report. The report covers topics at the top of every writer’s mind, such as the rise of AI tools in writing, based on a survey Medium conducted in collaboration with the Harris Poll. If you want to know how writers are thinking about writing right now, you can read the report in full.

The biggest takeaway is that despite AI and how the craft is changing, we are actually seeing a revival in writing:

On our end, we know that writers still love writing — whether they’re reaching millions of readers or keeping a private daily writing practice. This is the quiet revival: while the world changes fast, the love and value of writing isn’t going anywhere.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Keeping calm while fighting tigers was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.