The Rise

What Is NaNoWriMo?

For about twenty-five years, November has been widely known in the writing community as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Ironically, this huge organization began by accident. In July 1999, one man challenged twenty of his friends in California’s Bay Area to each write 50,000 words in thirty days. By 2000, they decided to move the friendly challenge to November “to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather” and 140 people participated, including some from other countries. As the concept essentially took off on its own, Baty suddenly found himself in charge of an unintentional and growing organization.

Recognizing the rising popularity of NaNoWriMo, outside sources quickly jumped on board to develop writing programs and apps to help participants keep track of their word count goals and ensure they stayed on target to finish in time (the Reedsy Book Editor is just one such program that has a target tab to help you track your progress). As the organization continued to rise in notoriety over the years, so did the number of participants, eventually garnering hundreds of thousands of people taking the NaNoWriMo challenge every November. In fact, a few well-known novels (some of which have even gone on to become movies) were formed under this now infamous challenge, including The Night Circus and Water for Elephants.

The Rules

According to the NaNoWriMo website, the organization welcomes any theme, genre, or language and there is no fee to join. Participants were required to register with the NaNoWriMo organization solely for the purpose of having novel verification. Prior to November, participants were allowed to brainstorm their characters and plot, make notes, and even draw up an outline or a mind map, but all actual writing was to take place between November 1st and November 30th.

The Benefits

Completing Your Novel

Chris Baty’s intended purpose for NaNoWriMo was to push participants to not only start that novel they’ve been thinking about writing for years, but to also see it through and get it completed. Many aspiring authors stall out halfway through writing a book by stressing over perfection and perceived failures. Self-editing (and professional editing!) does serve a purpose, but everything in due time—your only goal during your first draft should be to write. In order to hit 50,000 words in thirty days, participants need to write at least 1,667 words every day in November. While challenging, this pushes them to focus on writing rather than perfecting (for now).

Like-Minded Writing Community

A community of like-minded people who share the goal of writing a book, experience similar struggles and achievements, and can offer mutual support can go a long way in successfully realizing an aspiration. Some NaNoWriMo participants have even gained lifelong friends out of this experience or formed a writing community that remains in touch all year long!

Bragging Rights (& Prizes of Sorts)

While there are no official prizes awarded, everyone who hits 50,000 words by the end of November is declared a NaNoWriMo Winner and officially earns their bragging rights. That said, participants can gain some nice benefits too, such as discounts for writing-related apps or a free proof copy of their book.

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The Fall

NOTE: You can watch a lengthy but very interesting YouTube video with interviews from former volunteers and participants here, or you can read the detailed Google Doc form about everything that happened with the organization over the last couple of years here, or you can read on for my own summarized interpretation of it all.

New Leadership

It all seemingly began in 2012, when founder Chris Baty decided to focus on his writing, which was being drastically overshadowed by this unintentional organization that continued to grow and demand more and more of his time. When Baty stepped down, Grant Faulkner stepped up as the new executive director.

Unfortunately, it seems Faulkner was more focused on pushing for donations than in keeping the integrity of the original goal for the organization. In fact, as one of the prizes for 2023, he even included a scammy vanity press posing as an “agent” called Inkitt (check out Writer Beware‘s in-depth article about it here). But at least the things that occurred under Faulkner’s watch were mostly benign compared to what was to come with the next executive director.

When Faulkner stepped down after NaNoWriMo 2023, Kilby Blades took over his position, and that’s when things really took a dive. The first red flag should have been the fact that Kilby Blades is not her real name, but a pen name originally belonging to her deceased friend. On top of that, her profile photo is an AI-created image. The question I have: Why is she hiding? (Blades claims it’s due to her first books with spicy content written under this very pen name and wanting to keep her given name completely separate, but I’m not buying it.)

Racism, Ableism, & Exploitation, Oh My!

During Kilby’s reign, there were vast amounts of employees and volunteers alike claiming mistreatment due to a variety of factors, some as extreme as racism and ableism (many autistic, blind, and people of color were removed from their positions without notice or not allowed to return). But perhaps even worse was the exploitation of children.

NaNoWriMo was big on encouraging young writers to get involved, asking local municipal liaisons (MLs) to go to schools and tell them about the organization, encouraging them to join the challenge under their Young Writers Program (YWP) or Christian Teens Together group (CTT). This seemed great on the surface, but due to lack of proper moderating, bullying among the teens became a common thread. When the bullying came from some of the so-called “teachers,” the bullying qualified as abuse.

That’s right: There were no background checks performed, no verification of identities, and no confirmation of teaching credentials before allowing someone to create a teacher profile and pick their class by grade level. Talk about creating a buffet for predators! This made it easy for one moderator in particular, someone in a position of power, to make countless inappropriate sexual comments, spread the link to their adult fetish websites, and create multiple sham profiles and fake multiple deaths. What?

Classism & Artificial Intelligence Controversy too!

When these things were brought to light in the youth forums, Blades permanently shut the forums down without warning, cutting these youth off from the community they had created and allowing the moderator in question to continue with the organization in other capacities. When one brave teenager went to the adult forums to discuss the problem, the board got involved and shut down those forums as well, stating that everyone should go to in-person writing retreats instead. (News flash: Not everyone can afford to attend those!)

Most recently, there’s been a big controversy with NaNoWriMo’s stance on artificial intelligence (AI). The organization gave a vague answer to the effect of neither supporting nor condemning it, claiming that condemning AI would be ableist and thereby implying that they believe physically and neurodiverse writers aren’t capable of writing with their own abilities. The flip side of this is that many writers believe using AI to write a book for them is essentially plagiarism since these tools use existing texts written by real people to form its own version. All of this obviously upset many writers with a variety of backgrounds.

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Is There Still Hope?

All that being said, the decision whether to participate in NaNoWriMo going forward is a rather tough and personal decision. As an editor, I believe Chris Baty’s original concept is genuine, beautiful, and inspirational. Unfortunately, growth can be a double-edged sword. With so many people involved, things can be missed, overlooked, convoluted, and even straight up ruined, as happened with NaNoWriMo.

I will say the organization has issued some statements about making the appropriate changes at long last, but will they follow through? In March 2024, the organization claimed the website will be 18+ going forward, they will slowly reopen the forums for participants to use, and educators will be certified, but there is no timeline listed for any of these things to occur. Beginning April 2024, the page listing board and staff members is no longer accessible, but you can view the open positions via a link at the very bottom of the website. Later that same month, a credible source stated they heard directly from Grant Faulkner that the only people now at NaNoWriMo HQ are Kilby Blades, a part-time tech person, and an intern.

NaNoWriMo then created an entire page on their website in May 2024 explaining the changes they have recently made and also make some fantastic promises going forward that could potentially allow the organization to thrive once more, but are they truly going to fulfill those promises and is it too little too late? During a max exodus in September 2024, several board members, sponsors, and authors on the Writers Board left the organization. Many participants and volunteers from years past have also said they will never officially participate again and have instead formed their own challenges among their smaller writing communities. And as of October 2024, Kilby is still the woman in charge, although she is technically the “interim” executive director.

One thing is for sure, Chris Baty must be absolutely horrified by how his wonderful and inspirational idea took a drastic downward spiral without him at the helm.

Red Quill Editorial’s Stance on NaNoWriMo

While I continue to love the concept of NaNoWriMo, Red Quill Editorial no longer supports this organization. I encourage you to form your own writing communities and challenges without all the racism, ableism, exploitation, classism, AI controversy, and downright rudeness of Kilby Blades.

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Red Quill Editorial LLC

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