NaNoWriMo – write a Novel in 30 days

Friends, welcome to National Novel Writing Month 2025—also fondly known as “NaNoWriMo” among those of us who have a love/hate relationship with it. NaNo is the unofficial month during which writers of all sorts pour every word they’ve ever come into contact with and can chip out of their brains onto the page in attempts to write a full “novel” by the end of November. I put “novel” in quotes because the goal is mainly to write 50,000 words, which is approximately the length of a short novel. If you’re writing every day, that’s about 1,700 words per day. I like to take Sundays off, so that puts me at 2,000 words per day (which is a nicer, rounder number than 1,666.667 words per day). Of course, NaNo is very customizable. You can change your word count goal, or your goal can just be to write something every day. NaNo works best when you make it your own.