NoMo - I'm No Longer Participating in NaNoWriMo
This year would have been my 12th time participating. But NaNoWriMo is over. Learn more about my decision.
This year would have been my 12th time participating. But NaNoWriMo is over. Learn more about my decision.
I’ve always known that I wanted a career in writing. For most of my life, my big dream has been to become a published fiction author. As a young kid, I wanted to be a doctor, but that was short-lived. I started writing short stories in fourth grade, and that love for creating hasn't wavered.
For a while, I entertained the idea of journalism as a career. I spent three years on my high school newspaper—including a year as editor—and two years at the college paper, with one year as editor. I pursued a degree in computer science, only to return to what I love as a content marketing specialist.
While I’ve made a career out of my writing skills, I haven’t realized my dream of becoming an author. Not yet.
For more than a decade, National Novel Writing Month has been a significant part of my life. I’ve dedicated countless hours to the annual writing challenge, using it as a platform to focus on my goal and write a draft of a novel each year since 2013.
For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo is a challenge where you write 50,000 words during November. There's NaNoWriMo, the challenge, and NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit organization.
For a decade, I've supported both the challenge and the nonprofit by participating in it and donating. However, after recent events, I've decided to no longer take part in the official NaNoWriMo event or support the nonprofit. I will still tackle a November writing challenge, but it won't be through NaNoWriMo.
In this blog post, I’ll explain why I’ve stopped participating in the official NaNoWriMo event. I’ll also share how I intend to continue the challenge this year.
You can also watch my video on this topic.
First, I want to recap my history with NaNoWriMo.
I discovered NaNo in November 2013, three days after the writing challenge began. I was in high school, and some of my friends were participating. I wanted to write a novel based on short stories I wrote in elementary school and junior high, so I signed up. I was behind pace every day that month until I somehow met the 50K goal early. I still have the original certificate I printed, signifying my “win” that year.
For the next decade, NaNo became a yearly tradition I looked forward to. The forums made me feel like part of the community. I loved using prompts in the fantasy forum to work on world-building or share funny dialogue lines. And who could forget the infamous NaNoisms threads?
I met one of my writing friends through the forums, who invited me to a Discord server of other writers in 2018. Our small group of writers became close and is still active. Shout out to all of them! In 2018, we hosted our own sprints, shared art, and even read each other's novels during a novel swap after NaNo. These are experiences I wouldn't have had without the NaNo community.
I remember donating for the first time in 2018. On November 3rd of that year, I wrote a post on Twitter about donating: "This is my 6th year participating in NaNoWriMo, and today I donated for the first time. It feels good to finally be able to give back to a program that has encouraged me to write more and chase my dreams."
The then-executive director, Grant Faulkner, read my tweet during a Double Up Day livestream that same day. I remember thinking that was pretty cool. 2018 was the peak of NaNoWriMo for me. I had made new friends, the forums were inspirational and fun, and I had finally written a draft of my epic fantasy novel that felt worthy of continuing.
Then, things began to sour.
In 2019, NaNoWriMo released a new website. The changes were a mess and still are. Things didn't work as well as before, and the layout was more confusing. Changes were made for seemingly no reason, like changing how the word count graph looks.
The worst was the forums. After they moved the forums to Discourse, I used them less and Discord more because the new forums were not user-friendly or intuitive. Not restarting threads with the forum purge every year made it feel less centered on November. It was harder to get in on the discussion. And the bugs. Oh, the bugs were everywhere.
Despite the hiccups, I still believed in NaNo and that they would eventually improve the website. As time passed, however, it became clear that I had misplaced my optimism about the organization.
My annoyance with the website led me to visit only to update my word count or check out the forums a few times each year. While annoying, I still participated and supported NaNo. Once again, I still believed in their mission and that they would improve things.
Then, more issues arose. I’ll cover these in the next section.
I continued to participate in NaNoWriMo through 2023, but my enthusiasm for the organization waned. I found myself visiting the website less and using Discord more.
I'm not going to cover the current issues in depth, as so many others have already done so and have done a better job than I ever could.
In 2022, Inkitt was one of the many NaNoWriMo sponsors. It claimed the following on the NaNoWriMo website: “Submit your NaNoWriMo novel for the chance to win a publishing contract with Inkitt!” If you submitted your novel by January 2023, you could win a chance at publishing, getting a social media spotlight, and more.
Well, it turned out to be very scammy and predatory. I learned about this at the very end of NaNoWriMo 2022 and followed along with Rachel Sharp’s story about it, among others. I was appalled by NaNo's response to the issue. Mods on the forums banned Sharp for “disparaging a sponsor.” You can read the entire story in the blog post I linked above. By December 3, NaNoWriMo had removed both Inkitt and Manuscript as sponsors and apologized.
Because of this and the ongoing website issues, I decided not to donate to the organization in 2023.
As many of you probably know, things really got crazy in 2023. For an in-depth look, you can read this document, which covers everything that occurred from the end of 2022 to now. I’m only going to summarize what took place.
There was a moderator on the main site who allegedly lured minors to a fetish website and adults from said site to NaNo. There were also allegations of mods abusing their privileges on the Young Writers Program (YWP) site that NaNoWriMo hosts. There were also some racist comments from moderators about other staff.
Moderators went too far in November and began to silence criticism of the organization. As a result of everything that was happening, NaNoWriMo's board closed the forums on November 12. They also shut down regions for a time, and there are currently no municipal liaisons (M.L.s), or volunteers who help organize official events in their regions.
All of NaNoWriMo’s community aspects are gone. Right now, it's just a website where you can track your progress, which you can do with a Google Sheet or something like TrackBear.
The organization promised changes, such as overhauling the forums and volunteer programs. But, some changes, like the new ML agreement, have turned into controversies. You would think that would be the end of it. But, as it turned out, there was time to throw in two more controversies before November.
In September 2024, they issued a bizarre statement about A.I. and defended its use, writing: “We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of A.I. tie to questions around privilege.”
Major news media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others, are covering this story.
The AI statement goes against everything NaNo has always stood for, which is fostering creativity and helping writers. While AI may enable some writers, it's anti-creative, and its models are based on plagiarized works.
NaNoWriMo has since apologized for their statement and updated the FAQ. However, the controversy led to many authors on the Writers Board resigning. It continues to drive former participants away.
Most recently, the October 18th Preptober email from NaNoWriMo revealed there are no M.L.s this year. The language in the email made that seem okay because all they do is send emails anyway, right? Way to discredit all of the hard work M.L.s have done over the years, NaNoWriMo.
Those are just some of the reasons why I’m not participating in the official challenge anymore. NaNoWriMo feels like a joke at this point. Participating on the official website is pointless. All they can offer this year is a place to track your word count and get some discount codes if you succeed at the goal.
I'm still going to write 50,000 words in November and continue working on my fantasy novel, which has 126,000 words so far. I'm not setting a hard goal as much as I am committing to writing regularly through the end of the year, and I've already started toward this goal.
I'll be tracking my progress and cheering on others in the various Discord communities I'm part of.
If you’re looking for an alternative to NaNoWriMo, here are a few options:
I’m not affiliated with the events above, though I am a new member of the Rouge Writers Discord server.
You can use Reddit and Discord to find new communities as you tackle your novel this year. You can call it November Noveling Month, or a 30Day50K, or 50K30, or a November Writing Slam. Whatever you decide to do, don’t give up on your dream or the challenge because the organization that started this whole thing is rotten.
I've been a very public supporter of NaNoWriMo in the past. This year would have been my 12th time participating. I loved NaNoWriMo and the community, and I had so much fun over the years. But NaNoWriMo is over. Goodbye.
