Larry M. Coleman

I am sad tonight mostly not for myself, but for thousands of others. I hate that the “off” feeling I had at the end of November 2024’s NaNoWriMo turned out to be the smell of a proverbial dead canary instead of a dead parrot. As of today, the organization around NaNoWriMo starts the process of becoming defunct.

If a need or a drive is so powerful, eventually it will find a way to come out. I might have become an author eventually (maybe after retirement) but my road to becoming a published author might not have come so quickly had my desire to write not collided with the challenge of NaNoWriMo. I could have, like so many others, kept kicking around vague ideas and repeating the word “someday” had it not been for writing the damn thing in a month. Nothing focuses the mind like panic.

The high of the beginning, the frustration when what you thought was a killer idea starts to peter out, the enthusiasm when what you thought might need to be scrapped turns out to only need one key piece, and the feeling of accomplishment and pride when you get to the end and there are characters who have become so real to you that they’re people in your world now: people who only exist because you created them. If you’re a fantasy author (which I am definitely not), you even have a whole world built around them. And you did it in 30 days!

Like running a marathon, jumping out of a plane, surfing a huge wave, and so on, the feeling of completing a novel in a month is something you can only get by having done it. AI can’t give it to you any more than watching a video of someone skydiving can. Wanting to have written can’t give it to you any more than walking past your unworn running shoes every day can make you a marathon finisher. You do it by doing it and you’re left with the feeling that you did something hard and fun. Even if you only do it once, you’ll have that feeling to carry with you forever.

That’s what makes me so sad about this. Untold thousands of people will miss out on something I got to have. There are a lot of communities out there that do similar things and I hope people will find them. Writing a novel is something hard, insane, and worthwhile. It changes you in the same way that finishing your first marathon does. It shows you that you can do something insane just for the sake of doing it. Working your tail off on something for a month straight makes a lot of little inconveniences seem as little as they are.

I encourage people to find one of the many out there. Don’t miss out on the experience. As for me, I won’t be moving on to another one. I passed the 1,000,000-word mark last month. The first 160,000 of them will be published this summer. The others need attention, love, care, and watering too so they can join them. Although I finished last year’s NaNoWriMo with absolutely no idea what 2025’s was going to be, that changed around the beginning of the year and over the last couple of months, I’ve been sketching out what would have been November’s novel. The notes and sketches alone are already at 77,000 words(!), so I’ve reached the point where I don’t need the impetus of November to get me writing. In fact, I’m considering making November into Personal No Writing Month just to give myself a month of brain rest where I don’t write. (Don’t try to make that one into an acronym like NaNoWriMo, though. Maybe NoNoNo would be better instead: No Novel November.)

I will miss the intensity and the energy. I’ll even miss October’s excitement waiting to flip the calendar to November 1st as I let the upcoming novel churn and swirl through my mind starting in late September. I learned so much along the way. Some of it I could have learned the easy way (I’m currently reading Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and figured out a lot of the stuff in it the hard way), some of it I could have learned no other way, but all of it I’ll cherish.

The five NaNoWriMos I did were worth five hundred years of life. That’s a life that so many people will miss out on now. To end on a brighter note, here’s my October 31 pep talk from last year. Now that NaNoWriMo is over, you can use it any day of the year now, so keep on writing!