I’ve just been reading up on NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It's a global initiative thought up by Chris Baty, a Californian freelance writer. Very basically, once you've signed up, you have to produce a 50,000 word novel in one month: November. Chris has just written a book called No Plot? No Problem! – after six years organising NaNoWriMo he's probably quite uniquely placed to produce this title.

It’s now in its seventh year and has gone from 21 people in 1999 to over 42,000 last year, about 6,000 of which met the deadline on midnight, November 30, 2004, thus entering the NaNoWriMo roll of honour.

It’s all quite a bit of a laugh really, because, as the website says,

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality…You will be writing a lot of crap.

The Washington Post sums it up with the line, ‘a faster piece is better than a masterpiece’.

And of course, if you make that deadline, you are free to indulge in ‘the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children’. Which has got to be good for you.

I found a whole on-line community of participants, or wrimos, who are keen to share their stories of writers block, what they’ve been eating and listening to in order to keep their muse productive, their irritating distractions, their prudish inability to write sex scenes, being torn between happy v. sad endings etc etc. Most entertaining, in a reality-tv kind of way.

Maybe next year…