National Novel Writing Month

Based on Wikipedia: National Novel Writing Month

The Audacious Dare That Launched a Million Novels

In July 1999, a freelance writer named Chris Baty convinced twenty of his friends to do something ridiculous: write an entire novel in a single month. Not a good novel, necessarily. Not a publishable novel. Just fifty thousand words of fiction, hammered out between the demands of ordinary life. The reward? Nothing but the satisfaction of having done it.

This was the seed of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo (pronounced nan-oh-RY-moh), which would grow into one of the most remarkable creative writing phenomena of the internet age. At its peak, the organization drew over four hundred thousand participants annually, spawned countless published books, and fundamentally changed how people thought about the terrifying blank page.

In March 2025, the organization announced it was shutting down. The story of its rise and fall reveals something profound about creativity, community, and the strange economics of organizing chaos.

The Beautiful Perversity of the Premise

The central insight of NaNoWriMo was counterintuitive, almost heretical to serious literary culture: quality doesn't matter. At least not during the writing phase.

Fifty thousand words in thirty days works out to 1,667 words per day—roughly sixty-nine words per hour if you spread it across every waking moment, or about one word per minute. That's a demanding but achievable pace for someone who commits to daily writing sessions. The math is forgiving enough that you can skip a day or two and catch up, but punishing enough that you can't ignore it for long.

The genius was in the constraint. Most aspiring novelists never finish a book because they get stuck polishing the same opening chapters forever, paralyzed by the gap between their vision and their execution. NaNoWriMo short-circuited this by making the goal purely quantitative. Write badly. Write quickly. Write something you'd be embarrassed to show anyone. Just get to fifty thousand words, and then—only then—worry about whether any of it is good.

This approach has a respectable intellectual pedigree. Anne Lamott's famous writing guide Bird by Bird champions "shitty first drafts" as the essential starting point for all good writing. Ernest Hemingway allegedly said that "the first draft of anything is shit." NaNoWriMo simply industrialized this wisdom, turning private permission into public challenge.

Why November?

The first NaNoWriMo actually took place in July 1999, but Baty moved it to November the following year "to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather." This was partly a joke, but it contained real insight.

November sits in an awkward calendar position. The excitement of fall has faded, but the holidays haven't quite arrived. The days are short and cold in much of the Northern Hemisphere. There's something fitting about retreating indoors to create an imaginary world precisely when the real one turns gray and uninviting.

The timing also avoided summer vacations and the December holiday season, giving participants a clear month without major competing obligations. And November's thirty days provided a clean psychological container—start on the first, finish on the thirtieth, with Thanksgiving providing a natural midpoint break (or, for the truly dedicated, a four-day writing marathon).

From Party Trick to Movement

That first year, twenty-one people participated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Twenty-one friends of a freelance writer, doing something that probably seemed like an eccentric party game.

In 2000, with an actual website (designed by a friend of Baty's) and a Yahoo! group for coordination, 140 people signed up, including several from other countries. Baty personally verified the twenty-nine winners by reading through their manuscripts. He also established the basic rules that would endure: novels had to be new (no continuing previous work), couldn't be co-authored, and had to be submitted for verification by the deadline.

Then came 2001.

Baty expected similar numbers to the previous year. Instead, five thousand people registered. Bloggers had discovered NaNoWriMo and spread the word. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post picked up the story. The website crashed repeatedly under the load. In the end, participants had to self-report their wins on an honor system, and seven hundred claimed victory.

This pattern—explosive, unexpected growth that nearly broke the infrastructure—would repeat for years. By 2002, National Public Radio and CBS Evening News had covered the event, drawing fourteen thousand participants. By 2015, the number had reached 431,626 writers across 633 different regions worldwide. More than forty thousand of them hit the fifty-thousand-word goal.

The Machinery of Encouragement

Managing hundreds of thousands of people attempting a difficult creative task requires more than a website and a word counter. NaNoWriMo developed an elaborate support infrastructure that was part writing workshop, part motivational system, and part social network.

At the heart of this were the Municipal Liaisons, or MLs—volunteers who organized local writing communities in their regions. They hosted kickoff parties, sometimes on Halloween night so writers could begin at midnight together. They organized "write-ins" at coffee shops and libraries where participants could type alongside fellow sufferers. They threw "Thank God It's Over" parties at the end of November to celebrate successes and commiserate over failures.

The organization also recruited established authors to write "pep talks"—motivational messages sent to participants during the grueling middle weeks of November when enthusiasm had faded but the finish line remained distant. These weren't generic encouragements but specific, often personal reflections on the struggle of creation from people who had mastered it.

The forums became legendary spaces for both support and procrastination. Writers could find advice on everything from plot structure to dealing with carpal tunnel. They could also spend hours in elaborate thread games and discussions that had nothing to do with writing—a phenomenon the community openly acknowledged as "collective procrastination."

What Counted as Winning?

The definition of victory was deliberately broad. Fifty thousand words of anything that the writer considered a novel. This could be the entire draft of a shorter novel or the first fifty thousand words of something longer. It could be literary fiction or romance or science fiction or fantasy. It could be fan fiction using characters from published works. It could be written in any language. It could even be, according to the FAQ, "a novel in poem format" or metafiction—if you believed you were writing a novel, the organization believed you too.

A parallel tradition of "rebelling" emerged for those who wanted to participate but weren't writing novels. Rebels might work on nonfiction books, video game scripts, academic writing, or other long-form projects. They were welcomed, allowed to validate their word counts, and eligible for any sponsor prizes.

The verification system evolved with the technology. In the early years, winners submitted their manuscripts for word-count verification by software. Privacy-conscious participants could scramble or encrypt their text before submission—the system only counted words, it didn't read or store content. By 2019, even this step had been eliminated. Winners simply entered their word count, and the honor system that had been a crisis measure in 2001 became the permanent approach.

This might seem like an invitation to cheat, but the logic was elegant: since the only prize was the satisfaction of having written a novel, cheating meant cheating yourself. There was no external reward worth gaming the system for.

The Business of Free Creativity

In 2006, with the event growing every year, NaNoWriMo incorporated as a nonprofit organization under the name "The Office of Letters and Light." This formalization brought stability but also introduced the eternal nonprofit challenge: how do you fund something that's free to participants?

The organization developed multiple revenue streams. Direct donations from participants and supporters formed one pillar. Corporate sponsorships formed another—writing software companies, publishing platforms, and creative tools all wanted access to a community of engaged writers.

Sponsors often provided prizes for winners. For years, the self-publishing platform CreateSpace (later absorbed into Amazon) offered winners free paperback proof copies of their manuscripts—a tangible reward that made the imaginary feel real. Other sponsors provided discounts on writing software, editing services, and publishing packages.

The organization also sold merchandise, hosted fundraising events like "The Night of Writing Dangerously" in San Francisco (where participants paid at least two hundred dollars for a write-in with staff, speeches, and raffles), and ran programs like the Laptop Loaner initiative that collected donated computers for participants who lacked their own.

These sponsor relationships would later become a source of serious controversy.

Teaching the Next Generation

In 2004, NaNoWriMo launched the Young Writers Program, extending the challenge to kindergarten through twelfth-grade students. The key adaptation was flexibility: instead of the fixed fifty-thousand-word goal, young writers could set their own targets. A typical goal for a young participant might be thirty thousand words, though ambitious students could aim higher.

Teachers registered their classrooms for participation and received starter kits with materials including stickers, pencils, lesson plans, and writing prompts. Students could communicate through dedicated forums separate from the adult community. The program reached 150 classrooms and 4,000 students in its first year.

The Young Writers Program represented an ambitious vision: that the skills of sustained creative effort could be taught early, that the terror of the blank page could be overcome through community support at any age. It also, tragically, would become entangled in the organization's eventual downfall.

Camp NaNoWriMo: Summer Edition

By 2011, participants wanted more than one month of organized writing frenzy per year. The organization responded with Camp NaNoWriMo, initially held in July and August (later shifted to April and July). Camp sessions featured more flexible goal-setting—participants could target word counts other than fifty thousand, or even set goals based on pages or hours rather than words.

The summer camps also introduced "cabins," small virtual groups where writers with similar projects or goals could support each other through the month. This added a more intimate layer of community beyond the regional and forum-based connections.

From Partnership to Betrayal: The 2022 Sponsor Crisis

NaNoWriMo's reliance on corporate sponsors created a vulnerability that became dramatically visible in 2022. That year, the organization partnered with Inkitt and Manuscript Press to offer special publishing packages to winners.

Users quickly raised alarms. Inkitt drew complaints about constantly shifting business practices and allegedly coercing new authors into unfriendly contract terms. Manuscript Press faced accusations of charging exorbitant self-publishing fees that left authors scrambling to offset costs through crowdfunding.

When community members questioned these partnerships in the forums, some were temporarily banned—a response that transformed concern into outrage. The NaNoWriMo community had built itself on mutual support among writers; banning people for warning each other about potentially exploitative publishing deals violated that fundamental ethos.

Eventually, the organization severed ties with both sponsors and promised to update its partnership practices to prioritize companies accessible to authors without legal representation. But the damage to trust had been done.

The Grooming Allegations

Far more serious allegations emerged regarding the forums and the Young Writers Program. Community members raised concerns about inappropriate behavior and inadequate moderation, including allegations of child grooming by some moderators and delayed staff responses to reports.

The board launched an investigation and placed the forums into read-only mode. Their findings were damning: a history of "overpromising and underdelivering," a lack of transparency and community accountability, and "too few people trying to do too much." The structure that had enabled massive creative community also lacked the safeguards that massive communities require.

Plans were announced to restructure the forums as closed spaces with certified educators rather than open volunteer moderation. But the forums never reopened. Municipal Liaisons, the volunteer backbone of the organization's local communities, had their access removed. The infrastructure of encouragement that had taken two decades to build was dismantled in months.

The AI Statement That Broke the Community

Into this already fractured environment came the artificial intelligence controversy of 2024.

That year, with a new interim director (former board president Kilby Blades) and recent staff upheaval, the organization posted a statement about its position on AI writing tools. The statement deemed AI use acceptable and, remarkably, argued that "the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones."

The reaction was immediate and furious. NaNoWriMo had been founded on the value of human creative effort—the specific struggle of people putting words on paper, one at a time, through determination and community support. To many longtime participants, endorsing AI writing tools wasn't just a policy disagreement; it felt like a repudiation of everything the organization stood for.

Critics noted that AI writing tool companies, including ProWritingAid, had appeared among the organization's sponsors. The timing suggested that financial considerations might be driving the philosophical stance. Authors Daniel José Older and Maureen Johnson publicly resigned from the organization's advisory boards. Sponsors began withdrawing.

The organization's response made things worse. A follow-up statement explained that the ableism and classism language "was relevant to the bullying dynamics we were seeing across our social channels"—essentially blaming community members for their negative reaction. This failed to address the substance of the concerns and read to many as condescending.

The End

On March 31, 2025, Kilby Blades published a YouTube video announcing the closure of National Novel Writing Month. The stated reasons were financial struggles and "community vitriol."

It's worth pausing on that phrase: community vitriol. From one perspective, the organization was destroyed by toxic online behavior, another casualty of internet pile-ons and call-out culture. From another perspective, the organization destroyed the trust of its community through a series of institutional failures—inadequate moderation of spaces involving minors, partnerships with allegedly exploitative companies, dismissive responses to legitimate concerns—and members expressed their justified anger.

Both perspectives contain truth. The death of NaNoWriMo was a tragedy of good intentions, limited resources, volunteer burnout, and the impossible challenge of maintaining trust at scale.

What Remains

The organization is gone, but the idea persists. Nothing stops writers from challenging themselves to fifty thousand words in November. Nothing stops friends from organizing write-ins at local coffee shops. Nothing stops communities from forming around the shared struggle of creation.

NaNoWriMo's real legacy may be the writers it produced. Novels drafted during November events went on to publication and commercial success. More importantly, hundreds of thousands of people learned that they could write a book—or at least the first draft of one. They learned that the blank page's terror fades when you stop demanding perfection. They learned that creative community can push you past your own perceived limits.

Chris Baty's 2003 book, No Plot? No Problem!, written during a NaNoWriMo month while he simultaneously drafted his own novel, captured the philosophy: first drafts are supposed to be bad. The goal is to get something on the page that you can fix later. The worst novel you'll ever write is the one you never finish.

That insight doesn't require an organization. It doesn't require a website or sponsors or forums or Municipal Liaisons. It just requires the willingness to write badly, quickly, and without apology—and maybe a few friends doing the same thing.

The Math of Creation

Let's return to the numbers one more time, because they reveal something about human creative capacity.

Fifty thousand words in thirty days. That's 1,667 words per day. At a moderate typing speed of forty words per minute, that's about forty-two minutes of actual typing per day—less than an hour.

Of course, writing isn't just typing. There's thinking, planning, getting stuck, staring at the screen, making tea, checking social media, making more tea, and finally returning to the keyboard. A more realistic estimate might be two to three hours of dedicated writing time daily.

This is demanding but achievable for most people with jobs and families and lives. It requires prioritization and sacrifice—an hour of television traded for an hour of writing, early mornings or late nights carved from sleep. But it's not superhuman.

The insight here extends beyond novel writing. Most ambitious creative projects are closer than they feel. The gap between dreaming about writing a book and actually writing one is not talent or genius or having more time than other people. It's simply doing the work, day after day, even when you'd rather not.

NaNoWriMo turned this individual challenge into a collective one. It gave people permission to write badly, structure to keep going, and community to share the struggle. The organization that provided that infrastructure may be gone, but the infrastructure was always just scaffolding. The construction happens in the mind of each writer, one word at a time, 1,667 times a day, for thirty November days.

The blank page is still terrifying. The permission to fill it badly is still liberating. And somewhere, right now, someone is writing a novel that no one will ever read—and that's exactly the point.