Update: On Monday, March 31, the interim executive director of the NaNoWriMo, Kilby Blades (a pen name; their real name is unknown) announced in a video update that the nonprofit is official shutting down due to financial strain and a “downward trend in participation.”
Halloween night. A stream of costumed people enter the brightly lit confines of the Coralville Perkins. They set up shop in the back dining room. At the stroke of midnight, dead silence ensues — save for the rapid clicking of keys and pens scribbling on paper.
“I’m sure this is not the weirdest thing that has happened at a late-night Perkins,” writer and Iowa City resident Emily Schulz joked of the local tradition.
It was the kickoff of another National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” for short. Those who dared would attempt to write 50,000 words between Nov. 1 and 30 to produce the roughest of novel first drafts, leaving all notions of perfectionism and procrastination behind.
What started as a challenge amongst friends in 1999 in the San Francisco Bay area soon grew into an international phenomenon. NaNoWriMo became a 501c3 nonprofit in 2006, and under its umbrella came a range of resources: a progress-tracking website, a Young Writers Program, tools to prep and publish, pep talks and more. Perhaps the biggest asset it offered aspiring novelists was its community-building power. Novelists could chat with each other freely through online forums, forming local and global friendships.
When Schulz crossed the 50,000-word mark for the first time in 2009, her first instinct wasn’t to scream or shout. It was a quiet moment in a downtown Iowa City pizzeria in which everything seemed to click.
“It was a horrible book, don’t get me wrong. It will not see the light of day,” she said of the draft. “But at the same time, it’s like, ‘I can do this. I can tell an entire story. I can come in on deadline,’ and I would not have had that experience but for NaNoWriMo.”
NaNoWriMo proved that the dreaded blank white page was easier to tackle with a support system. A number of published authors have emerged with bestsellers from the challenge, such as Marissa Meyers, Sara Gruen, Erin Morgenstern and Rainbow Rowell.
Not surprisingly, the event found solid footing in Iowa. Author Grant Faulkner, an Oskaloosa native and Grinnell College grad, led the nonprofit as an executive director for 12 years, 2012 to 2023. There are seven regional groups spread across the Hawkeye State, which include Iowa City — home to the UNESCO City of Literature and the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop — and the Central Iowa Authors (CIA for short). Other groups meet in Cedar Rapids, Siouxland and the Quad Cities.
For a decade and a half, Schultz never let a November pass without attempting the challenge. But 2024 was the year she decided to quit.
The future and legacy of NaNoWriMo is currently in peril, its organization embroiled in a series of controversies involving poor moderation of online forums, endangerment of child participants, out-of-touch statements about AI and abysmal crisis management. What’s left is a reportedly barebones organizational staff of three and a fractured global community.
Some stand by the organization. Others denounce it. Many more waver within the gray, feeling grief but not ready to completely sever ties for good. Out of the ashes, new perspectives on group writing challenges and alternatives to NaNoWriMo are arising in Iowa.
‘How not to handle the situation’
NaNoWriMo’s massive network of endurance writers — 412,295 across 671 regions in six continents in 2022 — have always relied on several hundred local volunteers, called municipal liaisons. MLs were responsible for organizing in-person writing events, dispensing advice and fostering relationships through regional chat rooms.
The importance of MLs became clear to the Iowa City chapter after a longtime ML, Marie Raven, moved overseas a few years ago. “It was a really great community, and it hasn’t really come back together since she left,” Schulz said.
Writer Kendra Gauge stepped up as a co-ML for Iowa City in 2023, despite living nearly 50 minutes away in Winfield. That “ended up being the year that everything fell apart.”
The nonprofit’s many controversies are laid out on nanoscandal.com. The first major backlash came from allegations that a forum moderator was luring young chatters to a fetish website, on which they were vulnerable to predators and child sexual abuse imagery. Teenaged participants also accused moderators in the Young Writers Program forums of allowing racism and discrimination to go unpunished.
“When they were confronted with evidence that this was happening, their first thing was to just stick their heads in the sand for a bit before they did anything,” Schulz said of NaNoWriMo’s response. “It was just how not to handle the situation.”
NaNo’s leaders decided to shut down the forums entirely, which dealt a swift blow to community engagement and wiped out years of conversations.
How the organization chose to communicate with its most dedicated volunteers didn’t help. NaNoWriMo allegedly tried to install a new ML agreement that, although more comprehensive, would place far more liability on the volunteers regarding issues like child safety at in-person events, without adequate organizational support.
Gauge said some MLs showed the agreement to their attorneys and were told not to sign. Numerous MLs began to resign as their concerns went unaddressed.
The org responded by removing every ML from their system.
“They get mad at us like it’s our fault,” Des Moines writer Stephanie Caffrey said. “It’s our fault that things are taking so long. We are asking too many questions, we are raising too many concerns.”
As a former co-ML of the Central Iowa Authors, a community she had been writing with since she began NaNoWriMo in 2010, Caffrey noted how poor the communication has been from the acting head of the organization, Kilby Blades.
“It feels like NaNoWriMo doesn’t exist in the way it did anymore, because it really stemmed from the volunteers,” Gauge said. “Yes, you have the people at headquarters that brought all the volunteers together and gave them the mission of bringing communities together, but they can’t really do that without the volunteers. They were the ones that made it happen and made it real.”
Anti-AI ableism?
The straw that broke the camel’s back for many participants came in August of 2024, when the organization released a statement on artificial intelligence.
“NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI,” it began.
“We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.”
An outpouring of criticism followed, much of it from within the NaNoWriMo community. People rejected the insinuation that disabled or low-income writers would need AI to produce quality work. They pointed to the fact generative AI tools repackage copyrighted work, require too much electricity to power, and are prone to the same biases as their programmers, among other concerns.
“It’s like, AI did not have the crappy childhood and the level of passive aggression needed to write an interesting piece,” Schultz said. “Human artists should be the people that generate art.”
Several members on the Writers Board resigned; one, Daniel José Older, pointed to the fact NaNoWriMo took a sponsorship from ProWritingAid, a generative AI-driven editing and writing assistant tool.
“Your position on AI is vile, craven and unconscionable,” Older wrote in his resignation letter. “You are harming writers and you are harming the planet.”
The org tried to clarify its statement, saying it takes issue with “situational abuse of AI,” but the damage was done. Well-known authors distanced themselves from the organization and sponsors stepped down.
University of Iowa sophomore McKenzie Capito, a NaNoWriMo participant since her freshman year of high school and an assistant executive editor of UI’s Cave Writing Magazine, said she believes the backlash was excessive.
“I think it comes down to, if we’re going to cancel someone over AI, why are we canceling this tiny nonprofit that has created a really vibrant global writing community?” said Capito, whose two novel drafts she credits to the challenge. “I think that is so powerful and that nobody else has done. I feel like I can’t overlook the good that NaNoWriMo has done for me, for the writing community overall.”
Out of the wreckage
Schulz believes the organization is not going to last much longer. She knows “nonprofits live and die by their fundraising,” and she’s seen an increase in emails from the org begging donations. According to one email sent in 2024, they’d been operating at a budget deficit four out of the past six years. The org had lost several of its grants, corporate sponsorships and a number of monthly donors.
Schulz said that even without NaNoWriMo, those in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids and the surrounding region still have access to spaces like the Writers’ Rooms — a volunteer-run organization that supports genre and topic-based “rooms” for Iowan writers to share and improve their craft.
“It was one of those few places where you can say, ‘I’m writing a book,’ and people don’t look at you like you’re weird,” she said of Iowa City. “They’re like, ‘tell me about that.’”
The Writers’ Rooms co-founders, who originally met at a NaNoWriMo session, tapped Schulz to create something similar. Now, Schulz is the co-concierge of the Parchment Lounge, which functions as a weekly free-write room every Monday at the Iowa City Public Library, offering a place for participants from near and far to “write and commiserate.”
CIA has rebranded as CIA Inkwell. With an active Facebook page, Discord channel and leadership board composed of all volunteers in place, the org launched Inkathon in August. Caffrey — a former ML who began her career as a published romance-suspense novelist through NaNoWriMo — said there are some key differences between NaNo and Inkathon. Participants could set their own goals instead of a hard 50,000 words, and were given trading cards as they hit new milestones.
“We were really worried that there would be some difficult people who’d be like, ‘No, it’s NaNoWriMo,’” Caffrey said. “But a lot of people were like, ‘Yes, we would rather give our donations to the group. We would rather because we see the fruits of our labors.”
The “Write All Night” kick-off event on Nov. 1, 2024 was a familiarly jovial occasion (even if the year’s theme was “serial killers”) with a potluck-fueled flurry of writing. In-person write-ins bounced between local libraries and restaurants, often to better turnout than expected.
After the run was over, the group’s compiled stats revealed that its 148 participants spent 50 hours together, writing a total of 404,500 words. Caffrey’s own 11-year-old son, who often accompanies her to events, hit his own goal of 15,000 words in his retelling of Dante’s Inferno from a middle-grade perspective.
Caffrey said one key thing that didn’t change with their emancipation from NaNoWriMo was CIA’s motto: “Yay, crap!”
“Apparently at one of the write-ins late at night, someone was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just wrote a big steaming pile of crap,’ and then someone cheered, ‘Yay, crap!’ That became our [way of saying], ‘Yes, your writing on the page is not going to be your best work, but that’s the whole point.’ You’re not going to end November with a publishable novel, but celebrate what you have written — even if it is crap.”
While Capito supports these alternatives, she said she isn’t holding out hope that they can match the scale or sense of global community that NaNoWriMo has fostered. That’s why she plans to continue to use the platform for as long as it exists.
Schulz, Caffrey and Gauge are keeping an eye on NaNo leadership, waiting to see whether they can turn around a ship that may already be sunk.
“If someone new comes in and they take it in a new direction, I might consider it,” Caffrey said of the possibility of going back. “But right now, I feel like it’s lost its shine for me.”
“You need a community to build a community, you need the people that are going to work together, and if you get one person in the wrong position at the wrong time, it can fall apart,” Gauge said. “But I think a lot of things can also grow out of the wreckage, so to speak.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
