The End of NaNo (as We Know It)

And if you made it this far, take a breath. Drink some water. You’re crops are flourishing, your brain has finally stopped vibrating, you’ve got that glow that comes from finally typing a sentence you don’t hate at 2 AM… that’s it. The little fires of creativity refusing to burn out (even when you’re super burnt out).

If you’ve ever questioned the importance of your craft, or your ability to create something bright and true and wholly yours… now is the time to banishall doubt. What you do matters—especially now, when creativity is fast becoming an undervalued resource, in a world that keeps asking writers to prove we’re worth listening to.

Storytelling is an inheritance: it survives change, commercialization, the almighty algorithm—every boundary and constraint conferred upon it. It never dies and it never stagnates. It can't. It’s as fundamental to being human as breathing. Your work—your (likely) messy attempt in November to wrestle something alive (come on first draft!) carries that tradition forward. You’re part of a long, long line of writers who grind away, improving your craft by actually doing it; and you’re keeping it real when that distinction suddenly(and unfortunately)matters.

As any Wrimo knows, the struggle is only worth it for the sheer audacity of trying—for its own sake. You set your own path to beat your own odds, to say, Look—I did an impossible thing.

I created something.

So: celebrate, and rest up (for the edits in December!).

Because NaNo is over, and we need to talk about why—and what comes after.

For anyone who didn’t grow up in the trenches of five-minute, keyboard-smoking word sprints, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was a sort of annual literary pilgrimage. Each November, NaNo invited anyone—from terminally online middle schoolers with great-American-novel ambitions (raise a hand if you’re me) to bestselling authors—to attempt 50,000 words in thirty days.

The constraints offered something extremely rare—permission. Permission to throw caution to the wind and dump whatever half-feral ideas were clawing at the door, without the overhanging specter of perfection; all the while, guided by a structure that was both ruthless and ruthlessly liberating. In return, it offered writers a feeling of belonging that they were always able to find in their creative lives (especially if you lacked IRL community or support structures). There were no barriers to entry, no prizes; just a badge of honor and the exhausted exhale of a job well (or messily) done, and a massive community checking in to cheer you on. You didn’t need an MFA, or a book deal, or a mystical sense of being chosen to join. Just the willingness to try.

November was NaNo season. Over twenty-five years, the community developed and grew to networks of message boards and coffee shop meetups, groups of two or two thousand. Even if your outline had combusted by week three, you knew scores of people in every corner of the globe were also staring at their blinking cursors and mainlining coffee. We were all bargaining with deadlines that we’d invented ourselves. We knew we were part of something big. The sense of fellowship, more than any hope of reward, was the spell NaNo cast for over two decades.

Which is why it was so jarring—ridiculously painful and painfully ridiculous—to see it transform something so fundamentally at odds with its purpose.

Here’s the thing nobody wanted to admit to themselves back then, in September, 2024: the slow creep of generative AI was no longer creeping, it was already accelerating exponentially. LLMs, steadily improved on a diet of pirated-book training and user data, was quickly colonizing every corner of the internet. More and more creatives were watching in real-time as communities buckled under the weight of slop content bloating their platforms. Google had begun to integrate Gemini into Docs, and Microsoft Word added prompt inputs at the top of all documents. Accusations were cast around on fanfic platforms and writing group comment sections to stir drama. Things were tense, and tiring; and ultimately, all too predictable.

That September, the Ellipsus team were huddled at a Berlin bar staring at our laptops and finalizing our sponsorship materials. There was a lot to coordinate, because a lot was going into this—our first partnership. Years back, when we’d outlined our dream future partners, NaNo was the biggest on the board—our own history as Wrimos, a mission we believed in—creativity without barriers, communal and stubbornly human. We’d stalked out sponsorship openings and staked our minuscule budget on a month-long September takeover as soon as we could. We drafted writing guides and pep talks, planned Discord events, prepared for email blasts to 600k subscribers, spending all the energy a then-tiny writing tool could muster to support the institution that helped define us.

The night before the first emails were due to send, we saw the message.

You know the one.

A now-deleted post from NaNo’s (interim) Executive Director, author Kilby Blades—framed as a response to the community’s legitimate concerns about the rising use of LLMs—landed with a brittle defensiveness and a kind of scolding certainty that closed the door before any conversation could begin. The community pushed back against the tone and framing that minimized worries about NaNo’s stance, and ignored what should have been obvious: that LLM use is materially harmful for writers. Surely, the Director of NaNo—a challenge where writers had to actually write to push themselves past their own limits—wouldn’t undercut the premise of the challenge itself…

But instead of opening a dialogue or clarifying their stance, NaNo edited the post. Then removed it.

Of course, the Ellipsus team knew we’d be setting our budget on fire if we backed out. But we’d just spent a year watching generative AI tear through creative spaces while we were building a writing tool designed to protect human imagination. As writers ourselves—who’d been sounding the alarm about the costs and consequences of generative AI—we knew what was at stake.

Beyond the endorsement (and its tragicomic logic—how exactly is refusing to use LLMs “classist,” when LLMs are overwhelmingly for-profit products built and sold by the almighty gods of late-stage techno-capitalism?), the most unfathomable part was how utterly disconnected the message was from the communities that had given NaNo its meaning for over two decades.

But the biggest question NaNo seemed to forget was… Why do this at all?

Why subject yourself to a month-long fever dream, writing enough to upend your work and sleep schedule and appointments, friends, roommates, partners, and basic responsibilities? For a month, the responsibility was to one thing—your craft: to compete against that petty inner voice that doubts your ability to write in the first place.

Imagine a NaNoWriMo equivalent for LLMs—a model “competing” to draft a novel in thirty minutes, churning out text with no stakes, no purpose, no meaning. LLMs don’t belong in creative spaces; they belong to companies that treat content as an inexhaustible, extractable resource; an endlessly-looping grift that feeds the entertainment machine, generating an ouroboros of slop owned by whomever controls the models trained (illicitly) on human work. What made the endorsement so feeble was the attempt to normalize a narrative that has nothing to do with the human impulse to create.

There were dozens of off-ramps where transparency and humility (even a tepid “we hear you”) could have rewritten this story. But it didn’t, and the community, in shock, broke its yearly gravitational center and scattered to various internet corners, Discords, and subreddits. Events on multiple platforms recreated the rituals.

And when NaNo’s shutdown eventually came in March, it landed like grief: not the loss of a website or official guidelines, but the erosion of trust in a loved thing that no longer resembled itself.

But we did what writers always do, in a way that feels particularly writerly—constructing new drafts of old communities, we brought those fractured spaces together. Ad-hoc events, challenges, Discord servers, support threads, and mutual-aid writing sprints all flourished this year (and you might have been part of one—shoutout to our Discord fam!).

Writers have always been great at picking up threads and salvaging the things that matter. The hope is that in the rebuilding, the shape will look a little more horizontal, a little more sustainable. The result are communities that support each other, rather than top-heavy orgs that cannot protect themselves against the whims of detached leadership. The shape of NaNo is amorphous now, but the impulse to gather, create, and cheer each other on hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s only strengthened.

And you did, too.

You manifested a stubborn little universe and wrestled your story into existence—despaired, got hyped about that one scene, maybe took a day off and regretted it, procrastinated a little (a lot), and triumphed against your own cursed itch to polish every sentence as you wrote it. You found other writers just as deranged about the process as you, and for a fast-moving thirty days, you tilted the world a few degrees back toward originality.

You wrote like a human.

The motto of LLMs might be: Nobody loves this, but we’re doing it anyway. Writers know about love—especially when its hard. The spaces and tools and platforms we rely on are shifting. The specter of enshittification will continue to shake down other once-loved communities. But the bots and their handlers can't extinguish creativity; creative refusal only clarifies it. Our work is to make sure there are places where creativity is valued, and where writers can be defiantly proud of the craft.

So here we are in December.

You wrote, and surprise! You're still here. And so is the spirit of NaNoWriMo—the real thing—resting in new hands: namely, yours. The people who made it matter.

Remember: stories have always outlived the systems that tried to manage them.