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RIP NaNoWriMo: When the World Shifts, Will You?
Change is not the enemy, but refusing to adapt is
I was scrolling through Medium when I saw an article by fellow writer Justin Cox saying NaNoWriMo is dead. At first, I scoffed. Surely not. Then I read on.
NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – once felt like the heartbeat of creative community. The November ritual with all the badges you could earn. The collective madness of hitting 50,000 words in 30 days. But more than that, it was the write-ins, the sprint sessions, the bad café lighting and worse plot twists that bonded us.
Before AI, we were a community of genuine writers, caffeine-fuelled and mildly chaotic. I remember how we’d gather in coffee shops, laptops open, deadlines looming. Between writing sprints someone would inevitably hit a wall and cry out:
“I’m stuck!”
A fellow writer, mouth full of cake, would mumble, “Make your character have a nightmare.”
Problem solved.
At home, I’d crank out 2,000 words a day. But on write-in days I’d hit double that. Nothing like creative competition wrapped in warm camaraderie to get the job done.
Those coffee shops made a fortune off us. I swear one of them closed because we stopped going there, but I…
