NaNoWriMo closes: How scandals rocked a novel writing community

This week, NaNoWriMo announced that it was officially shutting down.

National Novel Writing Month, shortened to “NaNoWriMo”, was a US non-profit organisation that encouraged people to try and write a 50,000-word novel every November.

NaNoWriMo director Kilby Blades announced the closure of the company via a 27-minute YouTube video posted yesterday. She explained that it was the result of financial issues with the company and the various reputation-damaging controversies.

Started in 1999 with just 21 participants, NaNoWriMo grew in popularity as people tried to collectively keep up with its daily word-count writing goals. In 2006 it became a non-profit company and for its 2022 edition, 413,295 participated.

Based around using the dreary weather of November as an excuse for wannabe writers to sit down and finally pen their novel, NaNoWriMo has participants write an average of 1,667 words a day.

It didn’t need to be high-quality writing, you just had to meet the word count. If you did, by the end of November you’d have a 50,000-word draft in your hands. Then, hopefully you’d also have the mettle to turn that into something more polished.

As the community grew, so did the organisation’s goals. NaNoWriMo created a young writers programme, an in-person writing camp, and paperback copies of finished scripts. It even boasted the genesis of some successful novels such as Sara Gruen’s "Water for Elephants".

But alongside the successes, trouble also brewed. A huge number of its users dropped the organisation in 2023 when it faced scandal as multiple users complained NaNoWriMo hadn’t acted to remove a moderator accused of grooming children on another site.

This wasn’t helped by many writers already choosing to shun the organisation over their recent stance on AI, claiming it could be a helpful tool in creative writing. Defending their pro-AI stance, NaNoWriMo argued that “not all brains have same abilities”, an argument many found ableist and patronising.

Due to these scandals, it became increasingly difficult to run the finances of the non-profit. "We recognize that the closure of NaNoWriMo represents a huge loss to the writing community, and that grief over this outcome will be exacerbated by the challenges of the past sixteen months,” Blades explained.

“This is not the ending that anybody wanted or planned. And – believe us – if we could hit the delete button and rewrite this last chapter, we would. But we do have hope for the epilogue.”

Although this is the formal end of NaNoWriMo, its goal of getting people to use November as a chance to write is still available for anyone who wants to give it a try.