While dreams of glory and publishing deals surely inspire some of the writers, it's the NaNoWriMo community's encouraging, everyone-can-do-it attitude that many find especially appealing. Online forums help writers work through plot snafus, and area coordinators plan local events such as group writing sessions and Thank God It's Over parties. "The idea of getting together online and being part of a community is very fun and so refreshing," says Lani Diane Rich, an author who jump-started her career by publishing two of her NaNoWriMo manuscripts.

The rosy atmosphere helps alleviate the pressure would-be authors feel to write something perfect. "We all have such impossibly high expectations of ourselves, but the truth is that every novel that we have loved started out as a miserable first draft," Baty says. And the whole purpose behind the tight deadline and seemingly impossible word count is to get people writing.
"It's just getting over the hump and doing that first thing and being able to say, 'Hey, I've written a novel' - and that's pretty great," says Martin McClellan, a web designer who has participated in NaNoWriMo for the past four years and has reached the 50,000-word goal three times. He's also cowritten a screenplay with his writing partner, Kent Beeson; it placed in the top 100 in Project Greenlight 3.

Emphasizing quantity over quality may seem like a guaranteed way of getting page after page of unreadable drivel. But even submissions of drivel are okay, Baty says, adding that most people who participate are in it just to flex their creative muscles or to say they've written a novel. Others, like McClellan, use the event as practice, to tone and improve their writing. Baty estimates that only about 20 percent of participants are dead set on getting their NaNoWriMo work published.