My NaNoWriMo 2025 Results

December is here again! That can only mean my latest NaNoWriMo attempt is over.

Now, before I go on, I’m fully aware that the official NaNoWriMo site is gone and everything, but I still follow the tradition in general regardless.

I never really saw the NaNoWriMo event itself being tied so tightly to that organization. 2025 was no different. I still participated in it this year because it’s just a personal tradition for me at this point. I’ll more than likely do it all over again next year, too. The way my writing has gone, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a tradition I uphold decades from now when more people than ever ask “What is NaNoWriMo?” in earnest.

As I discussed prior, I primarily wrote this year on my Power Mac G5. However, I had to take a trip for Thanksgiving to visit family, meaning I had to export my progress to open on a modern version of Scrivener on an M1 MacBook Air. Now that I’ve been back, I decided to simply finish out the month on this workstation because I saw no harm in it.

How Did It Go This Year?

It went spectacularly this time, and I say that with no sense of hyperbole.

I say with confidence that I surpassed my previous word count from last year and 2023 with a grand total of 24,733 words, bringing my novel to a current total of 102,382 words in length.

In fact, as I promised, here’s that table I had been working on detailing my progress.

Seeing this kind of progress is beautiful because I surpassed my personal best in both 2023 and 2024. Better yet, I didn’t have the same irritating hurdles I did last year with Scrivener not tracking my word counts correctly.

I also tracked my chapter progress, giving me an excellent idea of how long I was working on specific chapters, which was illuminating.

Insights This Year

The result shows me a few things I found interesting:

• Unlike last year, I managed to write every single day, even if some days were pitifully low in word count.
• I started in the middle of chapter 36 of the story and ended on chapter 46, meaning it took me about a month to flesh out 10 chapters, give or take. Keep in mind my chapter length is all over the place; I tend to end chapters when it feels right.
• I wrote more words than my attempts last year (20,011) and the year before (22,213).
• I didn’t hit the 25,000 words I was aiming to hit, but you know what? I was really close. If it hadn’t been for the hectic travel I went through for Thanksgiving, I know I could have demolished that word count goal. I’m still proud considering I beat my old records and redeemed myself from last year both in terms of word count and daily writing.

What Changed In The Process?

I was outlining ahead of the curve in late October, which did wonders for me.

Additionally, and this may be the most controversial of all to mention, I enlisted unlikely help from ChatGPT for outlining and idea generation.

Now, before anybody assumes the worst, I want to state for the record that I used AI responsibly. In fact, early on, I specified for ChatGPT to never generate prose, specifying that I would never use its words verbatim. I’ve even gone on record lampooning Billy Coull, an “author” who attempted to generate entire novels using AI at one point a few years ago.

Rather, I would go to ChatGPT with information on my novel up to that point, asking it for general ideas on what I could do or where I could take the narrative. I only did this a handful of times when I felt either stuck or wondered how I could go from point A to B with good overall pacing.

Let me tell you: ChatGPT can generate horrible ideas. Other times, it came up with ideas that were somewhat serviceable. In the case of the latter, I would usually either try to mesh or mend a few of the ideas together into something more unique or refreshing. When the ideas were poor and unusable, I would be ironically more inspired than if the ideas were any good, thinking “I can do better,” and I would manage to come up with something superior.

Other things I would do with ChatGPT was ask for character or name ideas, although 90% of the time, the suggested names were abysmal. In that instance, I would simply cherry pick through the names and form a new one through some kind of combination that I found most memorable or catchy.

In another more recent instance, I came up with an alias for a character in the story, and ChatGPT thought it would suit two different types of characters. It took that opportunity to describe these two proposed characters to me. However, I largely thought the two ideas were so lackluster that I came up with something else that was not better, but perfect for my story.

I know I could have simply not mentioned having used an AI at all, that nobody would have been the wiser. Still, I know I used it responsibly.

I’m fully aware that people have a bit of a love/hate relationship with AI. Extremists in the former category constantly laud it, too zealous to augment, substitute, or shoehorn AI into Every. Single. Thing. People in the latter category, on the other hand, take a curmudgeonly anti-AI stance to everything.

Still, if a someone writing fiction is willing to use AI responsibly for outlining, mixing up ideas, name generation (Prepare to cherry pick!), and so on, I think it’s a perfectly ethical use of the technology. I used it in this way, to improve my result instead of replacing it entirely with something much more mediocre.

Now Are you Finished With the Story?

Again, no, although I would estimate that I’m roughly two-thirds done with what I planned so far with my overarching plot. Again, everything is coming along nicely for the most part.

I will definitely return to this draft either during my next stretch of vacation time (which did happen quietly several months back) or during November 2026. Considering I wasn’t even done with my first major arc last year, I think this is a major improvement overall.

Pushing Forward From Here

I broke my 2023 NaNoWriMo personal best this year thanks to the following:

• My Power Mac G5 for giving me a (relatively) distraction-free place to work on my novel on an older version of Scrivener
• The MacBook Air M1 that my friend gave me a while back, giving me a way to work on the draft during a trip
• Just Scrivener in general, really
• Love and support from my girlfriend (soon to be fiancée) ❤️
• My former second brain, now demoted to a simpler and more streamlined Obsidian vault
• My pocket notebook for those times when an idea strikes me on the go

Approaching the Last Arc

I think I did much better than I did last year despite falling just a hair short of my goal this year. While I didn’t meet the expectation I hoped for, I did see improvement, and that itself is worth acknowledging. Will I finally finish this long story, now over 100,000 words long, by next November? Only time will tell.

Have you ever attempted NaNoWriMo? What about more than once? How did you do during those attempts if so? Did you actually hit the 50,000 word threshold, or did you just go at a different pace? Conversely, did you abandon participating in NaNoWriMo entirely simply because the website and organization are both gone? Did you ever participate in the other “unofficial” months dedicated to writing novels? Once again, feel free to leave a comment; I’d love to know what you have to share about this.