by A.P. Thayer
November is here and I’m starting to feel a semi-conscious need to draft a novel. Something about the days growing shorter, perhaps, or the smell of “autumn” in the Los Angeles air (it’s starting to dip into the 50s overnight). But there’s a void, too, where once there was something big. Something important.
Ah, yes. National Novel Writing Month.
There are others better suited to digging into the history and failures of the organization. I’m not going to do more than touch on what that writing challenge was, how it impacted me as a baby writer, and their catastrophic fall from grace. The organization’s shortcomings and their eventual closing left behind a hole that feels like it needs to be filled.
National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, was my first experience with long-form fiction. Writing fifty thousand words in thirty days is no small feat (1,667 words per day average) and there was an element of competition that spurned me when I first started doing the challenge in 2016. It was like having a professional deadline mixed with a solo sport activity. I quickly learned that writing consistency was paramount. Missing just one day was devastating. Missing multiple was a disaster.
I wasn’t the only one feeling the pressure. By the time I was doing NaNoWriMo during the pandemic, I discovered that other writers were doing their own homebrew challenges. Ten short stories instead of fifty thousand words. Fifty poems. Or they would adjust the word count to something more realistic for someone with a full-time job, someone going to school, someone raising children. They knew that the 1,667 words per day was often untenable for a whole month on their schedule. To quote Logan Ninefingers, “You have to be realistic.”
Like these veterans, it eventually became clear to me that the challenge wasn’t necessarily about attaining fifty thousand words by December 1. It became about developing a writing habit. It was the first time I was setting word count goals, scheduling sprints, and joining a community who worked together. In 2020, I attended co-writing in Cat Rambo’s Discord, and those of us doing NaNoWriMo would race each other during the sprints. It was my first taste of what writing as a professional would be like. Deadlines and discipline; consistency and community.
I’ve written before about how important I believe a writing community is to developing a career in words. Not only is a tight-knit group in which to critique each other’s work important, but a writing group is a place to commiserate, find support, and learn. They say writing is a solitary profession, but if it weren’t for my writing groups, my writing career would not be where it is today, and one of those writing groups exists solely because we did NaNoWriMo together. Between the community and the writing habit, NaNoWriMo became a hallmark of the autumn months for us.
And then… well.
First, there came the allegations against volunteers and moderators for predatory practices. There was talk of grooming and a lack of safety for minors. Troubling stuff that had many people deleting their NaNoWriMo profiles. The issues were supposedly addressed, but that is a hard breech of trust to come back from.
Then, a year or so later, NaNoWriMo cuddled up to an AI company. When there was understandable community backlash, they defended their stance on using AI, alienating a whole new swath of writers. This led to decreased donations, and in late March of 2025, the NaNoWriMo organization announced their closure.
This November is, officially, the first November since the organization’s inception in 1999 that there will be no NaNoWriMo, and the challenge still lives in my head rent-free. Although in the last couple of years, while NaNoWriMo spiraled downward, there has been a softening of the pull to bang out a novel over the course of 30 days, the desire is not fully gone. I miss the sprints. I miss the panic. I miss the competition played out in spreadsheets and graphs as we all worked to reach our word count goals.
Whatever the organization is guilty of, though, I am thankful for what it left me. It taught me that consistency would get me further than motivation, inspiration, or luck. It taught me to treat a writing habit like going to the gym. Go, especially on the days you don’t want to go. You’ll never regret a day at the gym, just like you’ll never regret a writing session. I’m lucky enough to be able to treat my writing time as holy and I show gratitude for that by showing up during the time I set aside for writing.
That’s not to say that I write every day, or that I haven’t had entire weeks without writing. I think the phrase “write every day” makes some people see red (and I understand why). Consistency is going to look different from person to person. It’s going to look different even between seasons for the same person. Like the gym, some people are able to work out an hour a day, five days a week. Others can only fit thirty minutes on the treadmill every other Sunday into their schedule. When I connected with other writers during NaNoWriMo, that’s what I learned. Everyone is on their own path, there’s no one right way, and you’re only ever really competing with the past version of yourself.
And that’s the final thing it taught me. It taught me that I could do a very hard thing. After a lifetime of lack of motivation, lack of care, and what society deemed as laziness (I only discovered my neurodivergence two years ago), writing is the first and only thing I have been able to dedicate myself to fully. The only thing I’ve managed to make stick for years now. And NaNoWriMo, especially, became a yearly reminder that I was able to stick to it. A way for me to compare myself to the past version of myself.
It's gone now, and I have other ways I measure my personal success and compete with myself, but NaNoWriMo was the beginning of that for me, and now it’s gone, I feel like something is gone forever.
Works Cited
Creamer, Ella. “Scandal-hit creative writing website NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years.” The Guardian, 2 Apr. 2025, www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/02/creative-writing-nanowrimo-to-close-after-20-years.