BBC1 in the UK this morning ran a feature piece about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Every November, thousands of writers, from all walks of life and levels of skill and experience,  set themselves the NaNoWriMo challenge to start writing a new novel on November 1st, and complete at least 50,000 words by midnight November 30th. The challenge highlights quantity over quality - but 50,000 words could easily become a new novel’s first draft.

The BBC report focused on an interesting element of the challenge in that the once solitary occupation of writing has become a community one. With the online virtual community of global writers taking part, there are also small groups of individuals getting together in coffee shops and libraries to actually sit together and write.

One of the commenters on the report criticised NaNoWriMo for not having produced a higher standard of output and how very few novels have ever made it into publication - just 18 in total.  Clearly they missed the point entirely.

NaNoWriMo offers community encouragement and peer support for thousands of individuals each year to achieve something that they may otherwise never achieve, and that cannot be a bad thing. All power to NaNoWriMo in the future, and with the 2007 collective word count almost at 900,000,000 at the time of writing this post, it looks like the challenge is going from strength to strength.