I learned today that National Novel Writing Month, or, rather, the current organization behind the project, has shut down as of April 2025. I am sad to hear about this new, despite having deleted my own account in 2024 after feeling rather icky about NaNoWriMo’s AI statement.1 It seems I was not alone, and many other people left, and that plus lack of funds meant the 25-year-old writing challenge was kaput.
I first learned about NaNo in 2002, at the ripe age of 19. In those halcyon days, I used to write serialized fiction, posting the chapters online for my AOL friends to read. At some point, the 50,000 word novel writing challenge in November was explained to me, and I, like a lot of people, thought it was great. And I was hooked; around the end of October, I would remember that NaNoWriMo was coming and would start to plot what I wanted to write that year. (It truly is funny that I am writing this at the end of October. It’s like a mind muscle memory to think of NaNoWriMo around this time, I guess.)
My “win” count for the site is a measly three novels, of which one I much later realized was the same plot as The Running Man (novel, not movie). And perhaps I should count my graduate thesis play, Peace, which was not 50,000 words but was, at least, completed. Most of my early novel attempts coincided with college; namely, with me being in plays and having to stop writing when the show got closer to opening. A whole lot of concepts, jettisoned and left to linger in various writing folders on my computer or on Google Drive. I started in 2002 but my first win wasn’t until 2014, which also happened to be my first year out of grad school.
Similarly, I wasn’t very active in the forums either, or the group writes or any of that. There weren’t a lot in Idaho, where I lived when I started writing, and by the time I moved to Portland, I was so used to not doing NaNo as a group event that I just never participated, other than introducing myself on the regional forums.
That said, NaNoWriMo was a really special event. It was the perfect introverts challenge, for starters: you put in as much engagement with it as you’d like, and weren’t expected to do more (or less). You could go to a group write, or you could write alone at your computer. It was all participation. It also resulted in a lot of fairly well known novels. Hugh Howey’s Silo series is perhaps the most famous as of this writing, due to the books being turned into an AppleTV show (which in some ways is better and worse than the books). And the weekly “pep talks” by famous authors was great. To have a community you could engage with on your terms felt very special.
NaNoWriMo was a foundational experience for my writing history. It was a challenge that did not hold your hand and ultimately only had you as the arbiter of whether you won or not. The 50,000 words was arbitrary; a nice round number and fairly acceptable novella writing length, but it could be anything. You could write ten 10,000 word short stories. You could write a play! Or music, or poetry, or whatever. The point was that you showed up and participated. And that sense of self-fulfillment carried with me to this very day. It really taught people that you just gotta get up and do the thing if you want to get to 50,000 words, or 10,000 steps per day, or three miles run, or four … quilts made. You get the gist.
And it’s on that note that I will miss NaNoWriMo. I think the organization ultimately shot themselves in the foot with the AI & moderator debacles, but I also remember their fundraising campaigns never reaching the numbers they were hoping for. It makes me wonder if they were bleeding money and were hoping for some sort of financial solution through AI. Trying to get a ride on that bubble. An unfortunate reality about running a business in the modern internet era. Although the AI thing really does exemplify the “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” concept. Oh well.
All things eventually end, though the spirit behind them can remain a bit longer. I think I’ll still try to participate in a writing challenge this November, for example. November Novel Drafting Challenge? NoNoDraCha? Let’s see if I win this year.
Pour a cold one out for NaNoWriMo. 1999-2025. RIP!
- There was also an unfortunate mishap with inappropriate behavior by moderators in their forums a couple years prior to the AI statement, which probably began to sour people’s opinions of the site. ↩︎