November is a popular month with it being the beginning of the holiday season and the now socially accepted lack of shaving, but there is more to it than that. November is also National Novel Writing Month or Nanowrimo. This is an event celebrated worldwide and tracked online. Individual writers work to create a 50,000 word masterpiece by the end of the month.

This writing event began in 1999, and it has steadily grown over the years. It began as a local event held with 21 writers in the San Francisco area. As Nanowrimo grew the dates changed and were later and later in the year.  After setting up National Novel Writing month as a recognized event overcame money troubles and getting the word out the event began to grow outside of the small community. 21 writers changed into 300,000 and writers are spread worldwide. In Lexington, there are writing workshops being held to help writers along.

Nanowrimo isn’t intended to be something that pressures writers and offers no benefits. Instead encouragement is offered and a community is established for all writers. Nanowrimo doesn’t mean that you have to write, though. Many authors go on from this and publish their work. You can support the work of Nanowrimo by reading those pieces.

You can join this community by visiting nanowrimo.org and signing up to write the novel. Once you are signed up, you can get motivation from some of the other 296,998 writers and track your progress. It is a little late now to begin, but you can still get started. Even if you aren’t interested in writing for this month you can still visit the site to find a list of published novels of Nanowrimo.