Every November, a global community of writers embarks on a shared mission: to write 50,000 words in just 30 days.
NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, was born in 1999 as a straightforward challenge to ignite the spark of creativity in everyone. The concept is refreshingly simple: for one month, you commit to writing, aiming for a tangible goal of 50,000 words. By maintaining an average of 1,667 words per day, you can proudly say you've 'completed' NaNoWriMo.
For writers who want to make writing part of their daily routine, events like NaNoWriMo (or “NaNo” for short) can be particularly effective. NaNo’s narrow time frame and concrete end goal put a defined scope on your work, so you’re not floundering in a sea of uncertainty. If your efforts are unsustainable but effective, that’s fine. They don’t have to be sustainable– they just have to last a month. On top of that, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write. Not to write well. If you churn out 50,000 words of utter garbage, you are just as successful as someone who painstakingly crafts 50,000 words of polished prose.
In that sense, NaNoWriMo is an exercise in creative endurance and commitment. It’s a test for writers to push themselves—to challenge themselves to innovate on their craft in ways that they normally don’t. Best of all, it is a reason, an excuse, for them to prioritize their craft over their personal and professional commitments, which usually force them to neglect their creative ambitions.
The concept appealed to so many writers that it took writing groups and online writing forums by storm in the following years. By 2006, NaNoWriMo had become a formal organization, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with official programming and centralized leadership.
And that’s when things started going downhill.
The Many Problems of NaNoWriMo
Let’s Start Easy… What Does NaNoWriMo Actually Do For Writers?
Before discussing the NaNoWriMo organization's messier parts and history, let’s unpack the underlying premise of a massive single-month writing sprint.
As discussed, NaNo is focused on the singular idea of writing 50,000 words in a single month. To do this, participants have to allocate their time to average 1,667 words written per day. This is no small task, and writers typically feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when they can complete NaNoWriMo because of how much work goes into it.
The problem is that 50,000 words is pretty arbitrary and, on its own, word count is a vanity metric. These benchmarks on their own are divorced from individual writers’ goals, and to meet these benchmarks, writers will often rely on unsustainable habits– like staying up later or waking up earlier than they’re comfortable with, sacrificing time with friends and family, or neglecting exercise, cooking, or other healthy habits– to hit their goals for the month. After all, they can go back to their regular routine once the month is over.
Furthermore, this pace of writing typically requires writers to engage in writing strategies like “pantsing,” or the act of sitting down and writing by the seat of their pants without a clear vision of the story they’re telling. To meet their word count goals, writers string along series of events that lack a clear cohesiveness or compelling character development.
“I could punch the NaNoWriMo creator in the neck,” Lisa Cron, author of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel, joked when we discussed pantsing and practices like NaNoWriMo. “Can you write 50,000 words in a month? Sure. Will those words have meaning? Sure… in the dictionary. But that’s not necessarily a story. It’s just 50,000 words.”
NaNoWriMo is a Quick High
When writers complete NaNoWriMo, it gives them a rush. The sense of accomplishment feels immense. But, because it doesn’t create sustainable writing habits and doesn’t typically lend itself to honing your craft significantly, it’s short-lived.
You finish NaNoWriMo, and then what? Do you have a 50,000-word document on your computer that you do nothing with? Do you go back to not writing most days? Do you wait until the following November to feel that rush and sense of community and accomplishment again?
And Now for the NaNoWriMo Organization
Not only does the NaNoWriMo ritual fall short in terms of actively making people’s creative lives more rewarding, but the organization itself is rife with issues.
Incompetent Leadership (Content Warning: Grooming and Sexual Content)
Like many 501(c)(3)s, NaNoWriMo is helmed by a small team. Understaffing is no joke, and the nonprofit sector is constantly strapped for resources, making it harder for teams with big, ambitious missions to achieve their goals. As a result, NaNoWriMo, like many other organizations, has historically relied on volunteer moderators and chapter leaders to sustain the initiative's scale.
Unfortunately, it seems that for years, NaNo did not have an established due diligence process for vetting who was eligible to be in these positions, including people who were supposed to arrange and coordinate events aimed toward children.
One particularly horrid part of the organization’s history involved a Young Writers’ Program online forum moderator. This moderator “allegedly” also owned or operated an adult website of a sexually explicit nature and was using the Young Writers’ Program forum to recruit teenagers to go to his adult website, where they interacted with pornographic content and adult users.
Reports indicate that the NaNoWriMo board was notified of the situation but did not act until the FBI was alerted and involved. Rather than reporting the moderator or taking action to remove him from potentially causing more harm, the board sought to minimize the situation and avoid bringing any negative publicity onto the organization, even at the cost of continuing to harm minors and other members by pretending nothing was wrong.
Once the FBI was involved and victims set up an anonymous tipline website, Speak Out, to report harms encountered through the NaNoWriMo organization, the board finally got involved and effectively shut down the entire forum. Many felt their actions were too little, too late, and that the individuals responsible for allowing abuses to go on for so long did not receive due punishment. As of the time of writing, I have not been able to verify if the organization has implemented background checks or other safety practices for volunteer leaders.
Scam Sponsors & Partnerships
Again, while I am aware of the nonprofit sector’s ever-present need for resources and the importance of sponsors for making events like NaNoWriMo possible, the NaNo organization has an interesting track record.
In 2022, Inkitt was one of NaNoWriMo’s sponsors. The company also sponsored an event boldly claiming, “Submit Your NaNoWriMo Novel for the Chance to Win a Publishing Contract with Inkitt!”
Inkitt is, at best, a vanity press. At worst, it’s an outright scam. I’ll refrain from linking to their website. They have an interesting business model in which Inkitt covers acquisitions and their sister platform, Galatea, is a reading app that distributes titles that Inkitt acquires.
Inkitt has a long history of misleading, aggressive sales tactics. It claims to act as a literary agent while taking well above the standard share of what an agent would take by locking writers into exploitative distribution contracts with Galatea. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has written an in-depth history of the company and its dealings—it’s worth reading.
The justification for companies like Inkitt is typically that they can be a way for writers to generate at least a little income from their writing or start building a platform. Basically, proponents say platforms like Inkitt can help writers get their foot in the door. While few and far between, there have been a few success stories of writers making money through the Inkitt-Galatea partnership.
But, it’s kind of like a network marketing scheme. They dangle their success stories and the promise of making money in front of aspiring writers, while the reality is that most writers on their platform (at least, anecdotally) don’t make much money. Certainly not enough to live off of. And the transition from Inkitt-Galatea to traditional publishing channels seems to seldom ever actually materialize.
When an organization like this partners with NaNoWriMo– which primarily caters to new and amateur writers who don’t know the industry well– people who won’t know better will see offers like a “chance to win a publishing contract” and think that they’ve found their chance at fame and achieving their dreams. Instead, they end up discouraged and locked in an exploitative contract.
When pressed on why they would partner with Inkitt, the NaNo team gave a pretty non-conclusive answer, opting to state that they neither endorsed or disapproved of Inkitt’s practices, and that the relationship was nothing more than a sponsorship. To put it another way, they dook the money, and that was the extent of the critical analysis that went into their dynamic with Inkitt.
Confusing, Fake-Woke AI Stance
As a globally recognized writing organization, it’s no surprise that NaNoWriMo is also weighing in on modern industry trends, including artificial intelligence.
Within the publishing industry, there’s not exactly consensus about how or if artificial intelligence can be used responsibly. For some (mainly executives) there are use cases that are well suited to artificial intelligence, such as market analysis, manuscript sentiment analysis, and other promotional efforts. For many more, artificial intelligence should have a minuscule footprint in the industry or no footprint at all because of how large language models (LLMs) are trained. LLMs are trained on large bodies of text and are then made to identify, match, and replicate patterns. As a result, artists have their work used to train models and sometimes reproduced by ML models without compensation, representation, or acknowledgement. Ethically, it’s a nightmare. Philosophically, it also takes the soul out of what makes art art.
The NaNoWriMo helpdesk article “What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” confuses the issue by stating that they don’t discourage the use of AI tools because to do so would be classist and ableist and fail to acknowledge “general access issues.” The article reads like a college freshman who has taken a Sociology 101 course and feels really passionate about social equity but hasn’t quite grasped all of the concepts. There are a lot of buzzwords that would do well on Twitter or the glory days of 2012 Tumblr, but no actual depth of the topic. It’s an attempt to justify having no stance via moral grandstanding, like the Twitter main character of the day back in 2022, who rose to prominence (or perhaps infamy) by posting about how they were the only person trans enough and disabled enough to be white but not benefit from white supremacy being revealed actually to work for Lockheed Martin. And yes, that is also the “expecting writers to read is ableist” person. The moral grandstanding is a deflection from the lack of substance underneath.
When it comes to AI, the fact of the matter is that writing is hard. And the fact that people have different levels of access to resources, opportunities, and abilities that make it even harder for some than others isn’t fair. It sucks. AI doesn’t make that inequality suck less because it is not a solution for bridging access to opportunities.
Is NaNoWriMo a Lost Cause?
At this point, I think NaNoWriMo as an organization is a lot like Twitter. People don’t like the ones running it, but are so accustomed to it that they don’t abandon it completely.
NaNo’s biggest strength is creating a sense of community and camaraderie. Writers coming together to cheer each other on and support each other in maintaining accountability throughout November is incredibly valuable. It’s a fantastic experience to have a group of like-minded folks around you, cheering you on. And, sometimes, you just need to prove to yourself that you can do hard things and power through an entire manuscript (though, remember that 50,000 words is a pretty arbitrary number and may not accurately reflect a completed manuscript).
Despite the collective enthusiasm that comes with being part of the NaNoWriMo community, it’s not an organization we’re comfortable directly supporting or associating with because of all of the issues we’ve discussed.
The Future of Writing Communities is Small, Personable, and Responsible
Moving forward, I encourage writers to seek out smaller writing communities that are focused and tailored to their individual goals. If the sprint model of NaNoWriMo works well for you, that could be a good jumping-off point. Still, I would also encourage finding organizations that help you integrate writing habits into your daily routine so that you aren’t refining your writing to a mere 8.3% of the year. Better yet, seek out organizations that also challenge you to progressively improve your craft as a writer. That may look like critique groups, access to workshops and other learning opportunities, or book clubs that challenge you to think critically about your processes and techniques.
And when I say seek out smaller writing communities, I do mean smaller. In a smaller organization, you can make meaningful connections and decide if the group is aligned with your goals. One of NaNoWriMo’s most significant shortcomings is that it grew too quickly and didn’t put experienced leadership in place quickly. Rapid growth will kill an organization as quickly as no growth, and NaNo’s team wasn’t prepared to handle the challenges of having chapters and members worldwide.
Finally, if you’re a minor and you’re looking for a writing community—even if you’re a teenager and super independent—please flag any weirdness with an adult. If a moderator or community member makes inappropriate comments, pressures you to interact with them privately, or tries to send you to adult websites, make people (multiple people) aware. Trust me, you will thank yourself for doing so in the future.