creative-writing

Rest In Peace NaNoWriMo

/ charlesjamessfauthor

November is coming. This year it’s going to be different.

For the last quarter century, every November, I’ve participated in (and won) an annual challenge. I write a 50k word novel in 30 days. This crazy endeavor is known as National Novel Writing Month.

But in early 2025, the Office of Letters and Light closed.

Now, if you go to NaNoWriMo.org, all you’ll find is a Go Daddy domain for rent.

The final years of NaNoWriMo weren’t without controversy. There is no need to go into the specifics. But by 2024 many writers just weren’t participating… at least not in any official capacity. And they were losing sponsors. In early 2025, the organizers reported that it was no longer financially viable, and they had to shut down.

How it Began (for me)

I did NaNo for the first time in 2002. I consider myself an early adopter, since it had only officially been running since 1999. The internet was a much simpler place then. No Facebook. No TikTok. Nearly everything was text based. People had to connect through phone lines. And it was filled with the promise of unrestricted access to information.

In 1999 Chris Baty, a writer from San Fransico, and a few others put together the first challenge. And they stumbled onto something big. In the creative world, “flow” is a state of complete immersion in an activity. Creative types crave this state. It’s exciting. It allows one to generate fresh ideas. And it’s productive. What Baty and his group found was that by sacrificing quality for quantity, they reached into this state of creative flow. Story details were easier to remember. Characters took on a life of their own. And at the end of the month, many of them had written entire novels.

The idea caught on. In 2000, about 140 people signed up. In 2001, they were up to 5000. Then when I joined in 2002, they had 14,000 participants from all over the world.

People starting organizing local events… social gatherings to talk about the writing process, brainstorm, and “write-ins” so they could all write together. Collectively, a procrastination of writers would take over a wing of a restaurant, quietly typing away on their laptops. And saving their progress on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks.

At the end of the month I had 50k words toward a crappy novel.

And I mean CRAPPY. A first draft NaNo Novel shouldn’t ever see the light of day. EVER. They’re meant to sit on a hard drive, locked away in the Never Never Land of Stories. Then, there in digital sedimentation, they can be mined for the jewels within.

My first NaNo Novel was the origin story of a modern day ninja. It was inspired by a mix of 80’s Sho Kosugi VHS movies and DVDs like Payback and The Matrix.

Did I mention it was crappy?

Peak NaNoWriMo

I had the fortune to be in Edmonton in the mid-to-late 2000s. A core group of enthusiasts took over the local organization of events brought them up to a “whole ‘nuther level.”

We had plot planning parties, kick-offs with snacks and games, midnight sprints. Some years we organized conference-style workshops, where we would examine story structure and share productivity tips. In October, the online forums would explode with activity. There were hubs for local regions, lounges for your favorite genre and threads where you could read what everyone else was writing. Halloween became NaNoWriMo-Eve. And year after year a core group of writers would return to the exercise, serendipitously generating a community.

For writers, that was huge. Writing is a solitary hobby. NaNo provided a community for a lot of people who otherwise might not have had much social connection at all. (Granted many introverts are just fine with that.) But by 2015, NaNo had over 400k registered participants, and 40k winners!

It carried forward for years. Every November I managed to get my 50k words. By 2022 I had collectively accumulated over 1 million. The books varied. They were all crappy. Most were left unfinished. But the process allowed me to grow as a writer.

One of the great things about NaNo is that you can try out genres you wouldn’t normally spend much time with. Even though I’m primarily a science fiction writer, I’ve tried out action thrillers, fantasies, westerns, and even a horror. Last year I even attempted a romantasy.

We shall not speak of the romantasy, except to say that I brought crappy to a whole ‘nuther level.

NaNoWriMo in 2025

Communities of writers are still out there. If you look for local writing groups, or online communities, you should be able to find others who are still excited about taking on this kind of challenge.

I still am.

You don’t need forums. You don’t need write-ins. You don’t need an Office of Letters and Light.

All you need is a personal commitment to pound out 1667 words per day in November. If you can do that, you’ll have a novel come December 1st.

Why Most Stories Go Unfinished…

/ charlesjamessfauthor

If you’re like most writers, you find it so much easier to start a story than to finish it. Sometimes you get ten thousand words in. Sometimes you only get a page or so. Then story trails off and hangs in an odd ethereal limbo. You might come back to it, or it might be forgotten forever.

If you start writing a novel, the odds are against you ever finishing. I once crunched some numbers from National Novel Writing Month. Only about 20% of those who started writing a novel, actually finished. Outside of NaNo, I’ve seen numbers on the order of 2-3%.

Why is this?

The usual suspects line up… procrastination, a failure to plan, lack of discipline, self-doubt, life getting in the way, worry that you’re not talented enough…

But here’s a different theory: the underlying mathematics and neuroscience are stacking the deck against you.

Last week I gave a talk at Wordbridge 2025 on time management for writers. One topic I covered was the cognitive demands of creative writing.

Writing creatively actively draws on:

  • episodic memory – a type of long-term declarative memory that stores personal experiences, events, and their contexts including time, place and emotions,
  • semantic memory – your factual and conceptual knowledge about how the world works,
  • free associative thinking – linking of the episodic and semantic memories in a manner that generates coherent fictional ideas,
  • text formulation – drawing on your lexicon and formulating syntactic structure, adhering to rules of grammar (well some of us), spelling, context, language norms,
  • controlling the fine motor skills of typing or handwriting,
  • etc.

It won’t surprise anyone who has tried it that creative writing is a cognitively demanding task.

Now let’s do a little thought exercise. Consider the differences between writing Chapter Two and Chapter One.

Chapter One is all about the creative generation… building characters, events, setting, etc. You write out a scene in relation to whatever conceptual idea(s) you have for the story (if any at all). Then you move it through its natural sequence, doing all those mental tasks mentioned above.

Cognitively, Chapter Two requires all of that, and more. Everything that happens in Chapter Two, needs to be considered in relation to everything that happened in Chapter One. If your gunfighter fires five bullets in the first chapter, he only has one left as you start the second. Fictional facts established as true must continue to be true unless specifically disproved or changed.

Every detail in Chapter Two can potentially be influenced by every detail in Chapter One. Not only are you creating, but you’re also back-checking. That means writing Chapter Two, on average, is a more cognitively demanding task than writing Chapter One.

Now consider Chapter Three.

Just like Chapter Two, the writer has to consider everything that happened prior. Only in Chapter Three, there are now two chapters worth of prior details. To write Chapter Four, you need to keep track of Chapter One through Three. To write Chapter N, you have to keep track of Chapter One through Chapter N-1.

But it’s worse than that even!

There’s interplay to consider. Events and concepts from Chapter One and Chapter Two can affect each other. They can combine to have additional effects in Chapter Three.

Say for example, in Chapter One your main character lands her spaceship on an uninhabited alien planet. The planet doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere so she has to explore in her space suit. Then in Chapter Two, her spaceship blows up. Whether you state it explicitly or not, in Chapter Three she has a problem… she only has whatever air she was carrying with her in her space suit!

As a writer, you have to keep track of all this. You have to keep the story coherent.

To us math nerds, this interplay effect means the cognitive demand grows not just linearly, but exponentially. (One could argue in fact the overall curve is more sigmoidal in shape, because you’re introducing far less new information in Act III than in Act I. And this is why the middle becomes such a muddle. But maybe we don’t need to dive too deeply into the details here.)

The words at the beginning of a novel come far easier than the words later on. This is not because the writer has lost motivation, or lacks self-discipline. The cognitive task of generating more fiction that is consistent with everything already established gets harder as you progress.

It can then be easier to start something new.

That’s why so many writers have hard drives or cloud folders full of orphaned beginnings.

What To Do About It

Of course none of this dooms us as writers to a life of unfinished manuscripts. Here are a few tips to help get you through.

  • Plotting (vs Pantsing)
    Plotters (those who start with a story structure before writing), have an advantage over those who don’t. Developing a plan ahead of time reduces the need to carry all that structural logic at once.
  • Adjust Word Count Goals
    Give yourself permission to write fewer words per day on the higher number chapters in a project.
  • Keep a Story Bible
    A lot of writers will keep a notebook of critical information… character sketches, important plot points, world-building details, etc. Having reference quickly available means less work keeping it all straight in your head.
  • Take Care of Yourself
    As with any cognitively demanding task, the more sleep you’ve had, the healthier you’re eating, the more exercise you’re getting, the more socialization and down time you’re getting, etc. the more resilient you’ll be when you’re challenging yourself.