If you’re not living under a rock, or even if you are but have done creative writing in the last 25 years, you’ve probably heard of NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month or National Novel Writing in a Month.

It was created in 1999 with approximately 20 participants as a writing marathon to complete a first draft of a 50,000-word novel in a month. You didn’t have to polish it; you just had to finish writing 50K words. Over the years, people tweaked the rules to fit their needs:

• The 50K gave way to personal choice in length of writing goal, with some going longer, some going shorter;
• The “novel” gave way to novels, non-fiction books, plays, poems, blogs, cookbooks — literally anything with words and a wordcount;
• The “write every day” gave way to focusing on just the wordcount;
• The “share your work” online gave way to share your wordcount, talk about your work-in-progress, connect with other authors online, join mini-writing groups to motivate you, etc.; and,
• The “month of November” gave way to “mostly November”, with some variation by users.

About the only thing consistent throughout was that it was a sprint/marathon for one month, with a focus on word counts.

My involvement with NaNoWriMo

I did some stuff back in about 2015 or so but not really very focused or tied to NaNoWriMo itself, just that month. I didn’t register on the website or anything like that, nor even blog about it (which is a bit weird for me). But I didn’t sustain the effort, call it maybe 15K by the end of the month.

I put a lot of effort into my HR Guide in 2017, although I didn’t formally clock it as part of NaNoWriMo. Maybe about 60K words over a slightly longer period.

Then, in about 2019, I started writing a mystery novel with one of my main characters. If the character is a series, as I intend, this would have been about book 4 or 5 in the series. I got about 4 chapters in, and kind of went off the rails. I didn’t know the characters well enough yet…in essence, I chose something to excite me, but not something I was ready for yet. Call it about 12K in total before setting it aside. I’ll definitely still use it one day, but I needed to start with something else.

I continued my engagement in 2021 and chose to focus on updating my HR Guide. I started off really strong, hitting more than 30K words by the midpoint. Then life intervened, and I crossed the goalline just over the 50K metric, but far from done updating the Guide.

In 2022, I dragged Jacob and Andrea into the sprint. Jacob was writing a fantasy novel, Andrea wrote stuff about her cancer journey that she posted on FB and used some in ToastMasters, and I focused on blogging plus polishing my HR guide. We all dropped out long before the mid-point of the month. Jacob and I did get t-shirts to help motivate us.

And to be honest, that was really what I was doing. Setting a goal to “write more” and buying t-shirts as souvenirs and motivation. I did the same in 2023 and 2024. I like the premise, but it is more an individual, internal activity for me than a group, external activity. I wish Jacob and Andrea were more interested in it or had the time, energy and/or bandwidth, but really that’s just an excuse on my part. My quest, my challenge.

The NaNoWriMo organization died after last year

So, it’s hard to say precisely why NaNoWriMo imploded or at least not a single solitary cause. There were certainly financial issues of hosting a very active and expensive website with limited ways to monetize what was basically a social network to some writers and nothing more. Equally, though, they did have a lot of disparate threads going on, making it hard to see their ongoing vision outside of November’s annual sprints — sharing, posting WIP, small groups, links to other groups, online stuff, camps for teens, etc. And while the writing stuff for teens seemed great, they ran into issues with moderators being accused of both inappropriate behaviour towards and failure to protect teens in the groups.

They shut down in March of this year, and so writers seeking a replacement have found other trackers online or created their own. Some obvious pretenders to the throne are:

• Commercial companies trying to pivot their core writing tools / services to include NaNoWriMo-like springs, including Reedsy Novel Sprint and ProWritingAids Novel November;
• Writers’ communities with little fare, including NewNoWriMo for fan fiction and NoQu (Novel Quest which is pretty close to NaNoWriMo); and,
• A bunch of variations like AutoCrit (90 days), 4thewords (gamification), Shut Up & Write (all year), Order of the Written Word (different types of writing or editing goals), StoryADay (any month really), and Pathfinders Writing Collective (team goals, rather than individuals).

Yet I feel almost no interest in any of these. Maybe I just want my own writing challenge.

What do I want in a writing challenge?

Initially, I want something similar to the writing goals of NaNoWriMo. A clear “target”. Except when I think about the 50K total, while highly ambitious, it’s also not “universally” appropriate for different types of writing. For example, maybe I want to write a blog today or a short article for an online magazine. Obviously, I could eschew breaking the big goal into 1667 words a day, so that perhaps one day I go above, the next below, etc. And different forms might have different lengths. Yet, as someone with a deep background in performance measurement, I don’t particularly like wordcounts as an overall metric.

So, for example, lots of writers in the past were paid by the word. Which means some of their novels are dreadful. Obviously, I’m not trying to produce 50K camera-ready words in a sprint, but I also don’t want to feel like I’m padding some of my writing to up the wordcount. I’m already wordy enough.

Instead, I like the idea of something like 30K worth of usable writing. Part of a chapter, a blog post, some research summaries, whatever. But basically 1000 words a day. The challenge is that I can do 20K in four hours if I’m writing certain types of non-fiction, and 1000 words in my sleep. I don’t know if it is enough of a word count to still feel like a challenge. I can always up it in future years.

But the 1000 words also encourages “write every day” to hit the goal of 30K in a month.

I also know that the format is not important to me — novels, non-fiction guides, blogs, it’s all good.

I also may not share everything online immediately, but I will maintain some accountability with regular writing updates, as I have in previous years.

And interestingly enough, since it isn’t about an international/national campaign, I can really do it any month. I just happen to be targeting November right now.

My kingdom for a horse! Or at least for a name for the challenge!

Obviously, ‘Na’ is not part of it, i.e., not national, more “personal”. It is for writing, so ‘Wri’ could stay. ‘Mo’ for a month? Ish. ‘No’ is out for novel, as I’m taking multiple type of manuscripts and documents.

I do, however, also like the idea of it being a “challenge” or a “quest” even, clearly defined. ‘Creative’ could make the cut, but well, that could be anything…music, art, sculpture, anything really, but I’m talking writing.

I played with some ideas to combine a quest or challenge, and something to do with writing.

So far, the best I can come up with is:

Quest of the Quill

Or something in french, like Défi de clavier, if I could find a good french idea starting with “c” to keep the alliteration with clavier, but I didn’t see anything, so nah. QQ2025 is growing on me. A little bit of artwork later…and voila.