Good-Bye NaNoWriMo

Last week, the organization National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) announced that they are shutting down. While this didn’t come as a complete surprise to most people, it is still a disappointment to many.

(NaNoWriMo, for those of you who don’t know, is an annual writing challenge where people from all around the world try to write 50,000 words in the month of November. It started out as a novel writing challenge but morphed into a word count challenge because participants write anything they pleased.)

I don’t want to get into the issues that the organization faced since certain things came out in 2023. It was how things were handled afterwards that made it clear to many of us that there was little hope or expectation that this would end well.

I don’t want to write about any of that.

I want to write about what NaNoWriMo has meant to me. My spouse swears that I’ve been doing it as long as he’s known me, but I think at the earliest I did it for the first time a year or two later. Conservative estimates suggest I’ve been doing the challenge since 2003. That means, as of last year, I did the challenge nearly 21 times. 

There were a few years where health or other issues precluded my being able to participate but, when I could, I did. When one project ended up not being a full 50k words, I immediately switched to a new project, writing a novella. 

As a result of this challenge, I’ve created quite a few rough draft manuscripts, revised a couple of them, and am currently working on revising that one I completed in 2023. 

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that, even though the organization is going away, I plan on devoting November to working on another 50k words of something or other. Actually, I already know what I want my project to be for November 2025. I’ll write more about that here and in more depth in my newsletter. 

One of the things NaNoWriMo did for the writing community is it invited new writers to take a chance on themselves. I even know one aficionado who met her husband and formed many lasting friendships as a result of the challenge. You can read her charming real-life love story here.

For now, the website isn’t going anywhere, although I suspect most people will fall away, find other resources, do the November challenge on their own or with a group of other unhoused NaNoWriMo people. Many of the regional groups had already started using Discord as a way to communicate with one another so no doubt they will continue using those. 

My writer friends and I have been meeting online since 2020 every year for one hour of writing sprints and cheering one another on during the month of November, and we won’t stop now just because the official challenge is no longer running.

But I think it’s safe to say that we will all be missing having NaNoWriMo officially there to cheer us on.