NaNoWriMo Is Gone. November Isn’t.

It started in San Francisco in July 1999 with 21 people. By 2022 more than 400,000 were doing it. On the 30-first of March 2025, NaNoWriMo announced it was shutting down, citing financial struggles and community vitriol.

Whatever you thought of it, that is a genuinely sad sentence. 400,000 people, once a year, agreeing to write badly on purpose. There aren’t many things that get 400,000 people to agree on anything.

November starts on Sunday. Nobody’s running it this year. I’d like to make the case for doing it anyway.

What actually happened

In September 2024 the organisation posted a statement about AI, arguing that categorical condemnation of it carried classist and ableist undertones.

The reaction was immediate and enormous. Daniel José Older and Maureen Johnson resigned from the Writers’ Boards. Sponsors including Ellipsus and Freewrite walked. The organisation never recovered, and 6 months later it was gone.

My honest read, for what it’s worth. The statement was clumsily argued and landed at the worst possible moment in that conversation. The response to it was enormous and, in places, genuinely cruel. Both of those things are true at once, and the outcome was that a 25-year-old institution serving hundreds of thousands of writers stopped existing over a badly worded blog post.

Which is a spectacularly stupid way for anything to die.

The thing that died was never the website anyway. It was a deadline and a crowd, and those 2 things work whether or not anybody owns the trademark.

Why the format worked

50,000 words in 30 days is a faintly absurd target, which was rather the point. 4 mechanisms did all the heavy lifting.

A fixed date you didn’t choose. Every writer I have ever worked with can invent a reason to start next month. A date somebody else picked removes the negotiation, and the negotiation is where books go to die.

Everyone else doing it at once. Writing is lonely enough to talk you out of it. Knowing that a few hundred thousand other people are also failing to hit their word count at 11 at night is worth more than any productivity system ever built.

Explicit permission to be terrible. The whole design assumed the draft would be bad. That single assumption unblocks more writers than every craft book ever published, and it’s the one thing professionals understand that beginners don’t.

An ending. 30 days and it’s over. Open-ended projects expand until they collapse. A book with no end date is a hobby with paperwork.

The nonfiction version, since 50,000 words is wrong for you

If you’re writing a business book or a memoir, drafting 50,000 words in 30 days produces a heap of material you’ll spend 6 months mining. I’ve watched it happen and it is demoralising in a very particular way, like coming home with a boot full of shopping and nothing that makes a meal.

Nonfiction fails at the decision stage, not the volume stage. Here’s what I’d actually do with your November.

Week one, decide. One sentence on who this book is for, one on what changes for them by the end, and a chapter list of somewhere between 8 and 14 items. This is the week most people skip and it’s the week that determines whether the book gets finished.

Weeks 2 and 3, talk. Do not write. Record yourself explaining each chapter out loud to a real person or to your phone, 20 minutes each. You will say things you would never type, because typing makes people formal and formal makes people boring. Get it transcribed.

Week 4, shape. Read the transcripts and pull out the moments that made you lean forward. Those are your goldmines. Put them in order. Write the connective tissue.

30 days of that gets you a real spine and 40 or 50,000 words of raw material in your own voice. That’s a substantially better November than a heap of prose you’ll delete in January.

Do it anyway

Pick your 30 days. Sunday is right there, and there’s a reason November always worked. It’s dark, the year is nearly gone, and everyone is already quietly thinking about what they didn’t do.

Tell 4 people. Not the internet, 4 actual humans who will ask you how it’s going in a way you can’t dodge at the school gate.

Set the number and make it embarrassingly small. 500 words, or one 20-minute recording. Small enough that you’ll do it on the bad days, and the bad days are the entire game.

Then do it badly. On purpose. The permission was always the best part of the whole thing, and nobody needs a nonprofit to grant it.

Nobody is running November this year. Run your own.

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