Why I’ll Continue Supporting the NaNoWriMo Challenge

Oct 30

(Even Though I No Longer Support the Organization)

With November just around the corner, it’s natural that I’ve been thinking a lot about NaNoWriMo lately and, given the continued controversies that keep piling up against the organization, what my thoughts about potentially participating again are.

I’ll preface this post by saying that unlike other writers who may have been actively involved with the official NaNoWriMo website and forums, I never really utilized much of what the official organization offered. I didn’t use their website for more than tracking my word count to receive my certificate at the end of the month, and while I received emails from local affiliates about meetups, I never actually attended any. To me, NaNoWriMo was more about the collective sense that others were also out there working towards the same ambitious goal I was: to draft 50,000 words in one month.

I’ll admit that back before my first NaNo participation in 2014, I didn’t quite understand the hype around this challenge. Surely a “real” writer wouldn’t need such a thing to write a book, right? I thought of NaNo as being for “writer wannabes” who needed an external challenge to actually write their books. (I was clearly very misinformed and had a lot to learn!)

And then the fall of 2014 came around, and I was struggling to make progress on the draft of my second manuscript. I was about 20,000 words in, and with NaNo around the corner, I decided to use November to complete a slightly revised version of the challenge. Instead of starting a story fresh, I’d aim to write 50,000 more words of my draft to make it to the end or at least close to it.

Something amazing happened: in one month I wrote more than double the words I’d written in the several months prior. I used the official NaNo website to track my word count, but other than that didn’t utilize any of the other features. For me, it was simply a mindset shift that made this work. Writing 50,000 words in one month was a serious challenge for me (I am not what anyone would consider a fast writer), but I was determined to see if I could do it. And that determination allowed me to prioritize my writing in ways I hadn’t been the past several months. I wrote in the evening while my husband watched television. I got up early before work. I even wrote on Thanksgiving before heading out to my family gathering.

And beyond forcing myself to find time daily to write, the other mindset shift that allowed me to win at NaNo that year was forcing myself to just get words out rather than agonizing over whether or not they were the “right” words. This was just a draft, and I had to remember that. All of it would get reworked in revisions. For now, I just needed to get the story onto the page.

I achieved all of this without a formal community of writers. In fact, back in 2014, I didn’t know many writers at all. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I began to actively seek out writing communities and build relationships with other writers. I won at NaNoWriMo that year simply because the energy and motivation that came from knowing countless other writers were out there working towards the same goal encouraged me enough to make my writing a priority and get the words down.

This was successful enough that I formally participated in NaNoWriMo again in 2015 and drafted what ultimately became my debut, The Serendipity of Catastrophe. Since then, I’ve done modified challenges many years, but especially since becoming a mom to a son born mid-November, my Novembers have not been the most ideal time to take on a writing challenge. However, the lessons I learned from my two official rounds of NaNo-ing have guided me throughout my writing career going forward, and I still strongly encourage any writer who feels up to the challenge to do so. As I’ve become more active in writing communities on Facebook and Instagram, I’ve felt energized by the other writers sharing their NaNoWriMo progress on those platforms even during years where I wasn’t officially participating myself.

That said, in recent years there have been a multitude of controversies surrounding the official NaNoWriMo organization that have been troubling. The moderator concerns involving young writers from a couple years ago and the more recent statements on AI have forced me to recognize that this organization is not a highly respectable one, at least not anymore. And that’s tainted my love for NaNoWriMo the past couple of years.

As November has approached this year and I’ve seen more and more writers swearing off NaNoWriMo, I’ve felt conflicted about my thoughts on the challenge. While the lessons that participating in the challenge taught me have stuck with me and made me a better writer, the thought of supporting an organization that has allowed for grooming of minors and that now seems to support generative AI didn’t sit well with me.

But then I had a realization: I completed my two official NaNoWriMo challenges with very little use of the NaNoWriMo organization’s website and/or resources. For me (and I think many writers), the challenge to write 50,000 words in November is much more about the energy from a community of writers working towards a similar goal than it is necessarily about the official NaNoWriMo organization. Sure, I enjoyed receiving my official digital certificate saying I was a NaNoWriMo winner and took advantage of some of the deals I unlocked by completing the challenge, but the real reward was having 50,000 words of a manuscript that I didn’t have on October 31st. The real payoff was in knowing that I set my mind to a challenging word count goal, and I achieved it despite whatever obstacles arose that month.

And that’s why I’ll continue to support the idea of NaNoWriMo even though I no longer support the official organization. For me, November will always be a month full of creative energy and motivation to prioritize my writing whether I’m officially participating that year or not. I’ll continue to encourage other writers to build their own communities around this challenge and support one another in this challenge, though I won’t endorse the use of the official NaNoWriMo website (I’m even leery of their word count tacker now given their stance on AI).

If you’ve been feeling like I have lately—not wanting to support NaNoWriMo given these substantial and awful controversies but longing for the creative energy that participating in NaNo brings—then let this be your permission to celebrate the challenge even if you no longer celebrate the organization. Just because the official NaNoWriMo organization started the yearly November challenge doesn’t mean the only way to participate is by engaging with and supporting them. Find your own community to complete the challenge with, come up with your own name for it if you want, and allow yourself to benefit from what the challenge has to offer without getting bogged down in the controversy and “yuck” that’s going on with the official organization at the moment.

Happy almost November writers! Best of luck with your goals this month!