There’s a song that says, “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.” I can say that about many people in my life. However, I think I was missing the people so hard that I didn’t know something else has disappeared.

I’m friends on social media with an author in California named Chad Grayson, and his posts quite often pop up. One of them floored me:  “While it makes me sad in a nostalgic, the collapse of NaNoWriMo has no impact on me because I’m never not writing a book.”

It would seem like the surprise in there would be that Chad’s always writing a book to the casual observer, but you’d be mistaken. It was “the collapse of NaNoWriMo” that made me stop scrolling and widen my eyes like one of the owls in my home. How did NaNoWriMo collapse? How could it collapse? It was an idea, or so I thought.

For the non-authors and writers out there, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The movement has authors or aspiring authors work through the month of November to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It didn’t have to be the whole novel—my novels range from 60,000 to 110,000 at the absolute most—and it didn’t have to be pretty, because you’d likely spend December and beyond proofreading and massively revising.

That part of the whole NaNoWriMo thing I knew about. However, when I went looking up the “collapse” thing, here’s what I found that I had no clue about.

The concept was started by Chris Baty from San Francisco in July 1999, and in that first year there were 21 participants. The next year, the event was switched to November, with the concept that “miserable weather” would better motivate writers to plunk themselves in front of their keyboards with a tub of rocky road ice cream and bring a brave new world to life.

I get that. Although I’ve never written 50,000 words in a single month, most of my best work has been done when the temperatures dip below freezing and daylight only lasts a few hours. I wrote White Christmas in the Desert in about three months, 80,000 words. Usually, my average time for finishing a first draft is five or six months.

Another thing I wasn’t aware of was, once that switch in months happened, 5,000 writers signed up in 2000 to participate.

I also didn’t know that NaNoWriMo had formed into a nonprofit organization under The Office of Letters and Light. They had a website and everything. How did I not hear about this?

Apparently, things went south with leadership around the time of the pandemic. Authors are particularly rabid about the use of artificial intelligence in writing, and NaNoWriMo came out and supported AI for writing, claiming “the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones.” AI writing tools like ProWritingAid were also sponsoring the event. NaNoWriMo tried to backpedal, but no one was buying it.

The last nail in the coffin came in 2025 when, after several changes in leadership, director Kilby Blades announced the nonprofit was closing due to “community vitriol,” as well as financial difficulties. However, a phoenix has risen from the ashes, as something called Novel November has formed to continue the tradition, although ProWritingAid is sponsoring that, too, so authors like me and Chad Grayson would likely not participate.

I also won’t be participating because I tend to think a lot before I start tapping the keyboard, and thus, 50,000 words in one month would require me to quit my job, order only takeout that could be delivered, only take catnaps and skip my birthday, which is at the end of the month.

Here are my thoughts on the rise and fall of NaNoWriMo. It never should have gotten so big, with the need for a director and oversight board and a website and a budget. Writers work best when they’re linked to other writers, like through a writing group, not chained to something that looks like it started as an innocent religion that transmogrified into a cult.

It definitely shouldn’t have gotten so big that it took stances on various aspects of writing, especially with using AI to write your books. In some of the online writing groups I participate in, even hinting that using AI to write incurs the wrath of authors, and like Hester Prynne, you’re branded with a scarlet letter. Only the “A” stands for AI user instead of adulterer.

In the end, the idea was sound. The problem was too many cooks put their fingers in the pot, and the resulting meal was unpalatable. Setting up concepts to motivate writing can be a good thing, but turning it into a giant brings up a reminder of the old saying, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”