NaNoWriMo is almost upon us and…
What? What is it?
NaNoWriMo is cancelled? The company closed it’s doors due to enormous pressure from it’s morally puritanical user-base?
Well… I don’t know about you but that feels like it’s worthy of a closer look.
NaNoWriMo Timeline
For context. Here is the abridged history of NaNoWriMo in 9 bullet points.
- July, 1999 - NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is founded by Chris Baty as a simple challenge among friends to write an entire novel in one month. During the month, 6 of them managed to hit 50,000 words.
- November, 2000 - The second NaNoWriMo took place. Baty moved the event to November supposedly to take advantage of the miserable weather and longer nights.
- November, 2001 - The event has grown to around 5000 participants, largely via words of mouth, blogs, and very early web coverage.
- November, 2003 - Some features are more formalised. Email pep talks become a thing. The Municipal Liaison (ML) program was introduced; local volunteers that would coordinate regional meetups, forums and local writing events.
- April, 2006 - NaNoWriMo officially registers itself as a non profit under the name The Office of Letters and Light.
- November, 2015 - NaNoWriMo boast 431,626 participants in it’s programs. Just registered participants, not people (like myself) who did it without registering with them.
- November, 2023 - Accusations are made against a moderator in the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Programme Forum. The accusations were serious and related to this moderator allegedly grooming minors. Their handling of the accusations was heavily criticised.
- October, 2024 - NaNoWriMo release as statement regarding their position AI, also largely condemned by their community.
- March, 2025 - NaNoWriMo officially closes its doors, and release a 30 minute explainer video detailing their decline, and the factors that led to their decision.
So there we have it. An accidental success story with a meteoric rise and a spectacular fall, a fall owing in large parts to the vitriol of their own community.
The Community Delusion
From it’s very inception until it’s death, NaNoWriMo didn’t just host a community, it was a community. Even after it became a non-profit and it started spending $1.3 million every year to sustain itself, many of it’s users never thought of it as a corporate entity.
Great! On the surface that seems okay? A kind participatory myth. A shared dare that anyone could take up. A sense of ownership and belonging to something larger than oneself. But herein lies a dangerous illusion:
“NaNoWriMo is its community. We are that community. And so we should get to decide how it behaves.”
Here we have a community that projected itself onto the brand so completely that any deviation, whether that be a stance on AI, issues with moderation and policy, or software changes, felt like a personal betrayal.
We don’t usually expect companies to personally align with our point of view. You might not like Apple’s business plan, but you don’t feel personally affronted by its existence. But when the ‘product’ is the community itself, that sense of ownership creeps in. Soon, it’s no longer just about policy, it’s about morality. A rare bird is the company that can stay aloft amidst the impossible moral standards and new-age Puritanism of the past half-decade. And NaNoWriMo weren’t no kākāpō. You only had to glance at their forums any time between 2010 and their closure in 2024 as proof of that.
By the late 2010’s, the NaNoWriMo forums, like everything else, had become deeply moralised. The vibe went from “let’s write together” to “let’s protect this space from harm,” which, in fairness, was not a unique phenomenon. Here is what the trajectory of online spaces of the past 25 years looks like:
- Early forums prioritise inclusivity and self-regulation. “Anyone who’s into this weird niche thing we’re into is welcome. Just don’t be a dick.”
- A few bad incidents (harassment, trolls, crossing the line) lead to calls for stricter moderation.
- Moderation introduces norm enforcement. We go from, “we don’t do that here,” to, “if you do that, we’ll boot you.”
- Norm enforcement becomes ideological policing. Once the rules are in place, people start arguing about what the rules mean, and whose values they should reflect. One user gets banned for offensive language whilst another claims censorship.
- The vague ideal of a “safe space” actually becomes a hotbed of moral absolutism. Purity is maintained by expulsion.
I was reading a forum post about NaNoWriMo in research for this article on a site called christianwriters.com. One user writes:
Call me jaded, but things were getting bad on the young writers’ program side of NaNo, back when I was about fifteen. Not like this, but for example, moderators were calling out and restricting Christian/conservative users like myself, and still claiming the site was “neutral” and “unbiased.” However, that’s obviously not the case when you’re allowed to support BLM in your bio, but not state that you’re against abortion.
By the time we get to 2020, at least as far as the forums and subrediits go, this is what we’re dealing with. It’s no longer a community of like-minded writers, but a moral bureaucracy. NaNo had just turned 21, and like all 21-year-olds it had some fresh new ideas about the world, and they feel very strongly about them because their identity is all tied up in their absolute truth, and who then judge their own parents by standards nobody could possibly meet. Not least of all a struggling non-profit reliant on thousands of overworked volunteers.
A lot of criticism was levelled at the NaNoWriMo staff. I don’t know if it was valid or not. But here’s what’s definitely true. They were never equipped to deal with that kind of public-facing moral labour. They were a handful of overworked non-profit employees trying to moderate tens of thousands of emotionally invested users — a mix of children, aspiring authors, activists, and sanctimonious keyboard warriors.
They were getting it from every angle.
From the nostalgia-sucklers: “You ruined the thing I love!”
From the posturing activists: “You didn’t take a stand!”
From the moral puritans: “You failed to protect us!”
And from the cynics: “You wasted our money!”
And every time it was personal. Every time a betrayal.
But there’s also another big reason their community turned on them, and it has to do with their enormous success. When NaNoWriMo started to seek partnerships, sponsors and grants, they were publicly transitioning. They were moving from scrappy communal start-up to corporate non-profit. In their farewell video, they state that from 2018-2023 less than 40% of their funding came from individual donations. And it is because of this transition that the illusion of shared ownership started to collapse.
You see, the community’s love was never freely given. It depended on NaNoWriMo as an organisation remaining small, pure, and, ultimately, poor. The moment it started acting like an organisation, the anti-capitalist alarms started a-ringing for many of its users, and the love was quickly and viciously replaced by hostility.
The Scandals
Scandal 1 - They created the opportunity for child endangerment, and failed to act when instances were brought to light.
In November 2023, a group of forum users presented evidence to NaNoWriMo staff of alleged illegal activity by one of its moderators. They claimed this moderator was directing minors, specifically from NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers’Program, to an adult diaper fetish website, either by posting links in the forum or by encouraging them to “investigate.”
It took NaNoWriMo several weeks to respond, and when they did, the response was far from forthright. They acknowledged receiving numerous complaints, but stated that not all of them, including those alleging child grooming, had been verified. The forums were eventually taken offline for further investigation, and in every communication they were careful to distinguish between complaints and verified claims, suggesting that much of what they were told couldn’t be substantiated.
The moderator in question was ultimately removed from their position (for what NaNoWriMo described as “unrelated code of conduct violations”), but was allowed to remain a user on the site.
From an outsider’s perspective, the core problem is that none of the complaints or the evidence provided to NaNoWriMo is publicly available. On one side you have a group of self-appointed vigilantes presenting what they described as conclusive proof of wrongdoing; on the other, a small team and its board, claiming they were unable to determine what was real and what wasn’t.
As an observer, there are two ways to interpret this.
The strongest stance to take would be: We trust these users and their evidence absolutely. It was obvious and overwhelming. NaNoWriMo failed in both their moral and legal duty. The backlash and loss of trust was 100% justified.
A more balanced take might be: The evidence appeared to be murky. The board seemed to lack both the investigative capacity or even the legal clarity to act decisively. The outrage quickly outpaced the facts. They were simply overwhelmed by a crisis that grew beyond their structure.
Despite this, the organisation did attempt to win back trust. Under new management, it launched a series of reforms: ended its policy of all-ages spaces; forced a site-wide reset that required users to enter their date of birth; created a separate interface for users aged 11–17 with added safety features; required educators to verify their credentials; became more transparent about spaces under its banner that it did not control; and paused programs where adequate moderation couldn’t be guaranteed.
But what they failed to understand is that nothing they could have done would ever have been good enough.
We don’t take apologies well in 2025. And by the time NaNoWriMo put a plan together, the criticisms had already crystallised into a symbol; one of moral failure and corporate rot. We moved from, “hey, this is happening,” to, “you enabled predators,” and once that happened, nothing short of self-immolation would do.
The NaNoWriMo community wanted two incompatible things. A safe space for young writers perfectly aligned with their identity-marking values. And an open, egalitarian community with minimal corporate control.
In the end, they were left with neither.
Scandal 2 - They’re stance on AI was antithetical to their ethos, a slap in the face to artists everywhere, and offensive to people who disagreed with them.
In October 2024, a year removed from the previous scandal, NaNoWriMo released a statement entitled: “What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” The statement was bizarre, poorly worded, and failed, in large part, to read the room. It thrusted them into a toxic debate they clearly wanted nothing to do with.
You might ask why they bothered saying anything at all before you remember the kinds of people who make up this so-called community, for whom saying nothing is complicity.
By this point, the organisation knew they were on a downward trajectory. Terrified of pissing anyone else off, they tried to thread an impossible needle by remaining neutral while pre-emptively shielding themselves from the anti-AI mob by suggesting that opposition to AI could itself be discriminatory.
It’s an absurd position, and obviously ill-thought-through. They were ripped to shreds for it.
A later statement, aiming to quell the flames, did a better job of explaining their position:
“Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgement that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve”
In other words, have your debate, we want no part of it, and we don’t want to alienate one side or the other because we desperately need everyone onside to survive.
But of course, just like the previous scandal, it wasn’t enough. NaNoWriMo had started playing the moral game. They invoked “ableism” and “classism” in an overwrought statement when they should’ve only been saying things like, “Who’s going to smash their 50k this year?”
When you give the moral puritans the time of day, when you play them at their own game and when you try to use their language against them, you lose. Because it’s never really about the virtue, it’s about the power that the feeling of virtue gives you. It’s about the intoxicating allure of the high ground, of absolute moral clarity and superiority.
See: the recent case featuring mob of deranged knitters who tried to cancel Hank Green of all people because a video he helped make contained inaccuracies and, in their view, implied misogyny. Hank mostly ignored them, and they went away, likely finding something else to moan about. His company SciShow released a long, thoughtful statement that gave the backlash far too much credit, which, of course, wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.
In their farewell video, NaNoWriMo insisted the AI controversy had nothing to do with their closure. Maybe so. But it didn’t help. A hopeless task it may have been, but By they were desperate to win back goodwill. If their had been the faintest ember of community warmth left, the AI statement was the bucket of ice water that washed it away for good.
The pattern repeats. They act. They explain. The mob devours them. Again and again until there’s nothing left.
What will we do in November now?
I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo a bunch of times, but I never “won.” For more than a decade, even in the years I didn’t participate, I always thought about it. Once, somewhere around 2010, I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo because a few online friends were doing it. That was the only time I really felt the community aspect, and I liked it more. It was fun.
But I’ve never been a forum person. Talking to strangers online has never held much appeal. So even when I took part, I never did it with NaNoWriMo. Outside of the occasional cringe email, a progress bar, and a handful of digital “rewards,” I never quite understood what the organisation could do for me.
And I wasn’t alone in that confusion. Even the people who were deep in the community, the ones who lived on the forums and joined the virtual write-ins, didn’t seem to understand what NaNoWriMo really was, or what it cost to keep it running.
In their final statement, NaNoWriMo said one of the biggest reasons for their demise was this:
“Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service we provided was free.”
It’s a sobering admission, because of course it wasn’t free, not to host, not to moderate, not to maintain, but of course it felt free. It never felt like a company, just a tool, a tradition, something to strive for, a feat to accomplish.
When someone says “I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year” they aren’t really saying anything about the organisation at all. They are just saying they’re going to try and write a novel, or 50,000 words, in a month. And whilst that may well have been their downfall, although I think I’ve pointed out their were other dominant factors, it was also their strength, and it will undoubtedly be their legacy.
With or without the organisation backing it, for many of us, NaNoWriMo will always remain National Novel Writing Month. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
And so, In honour of their spectacular demise, this November, 2025, I’m competing in NaNoWriMo again — and this time I’m aiming for my first ‘win.’
Who’s in?