The moon shines through the living room windows, falling on the blue couch and the crocheted blanket full of purples, blues and blacks. It’s Nicole Hankemeier’s last night in her old apartment, and since all her roommates are gone, she’s sleeping on the couch in the living room. Looking at this scene, she is struck by the interplay of colors and moonlight in the apartment, and thinks about how much she’s going to miss it. That night, the San Francisco State music major has a dream about cats—cats wanting to play the piano. In the morning she writes everything down in the dream journal she keeps by her bed. Four years later, it becomes the basis for a fantasy novel, called From Wings of Song, about heavenly cats and their surveillance activities for the King of the Jungle.

Hankemeier is one of this year’s National Novel Writing Month winners. Her entire novel—all 50,000 words of it—was written last month, as part of an annual event that is now entering its tenth year.

Every year on November 1, people across the globe sit down at their desks and prepare to sacrifice blood, sweat and tears—not to mention GPAs and social lives—in pursuit of the ultimate goal of 50,000 words. The month-long novel writing event began ten years ago in Oakland with twenty-one participants, but today it’s an international event, with over a hundred thousand aspiring novelists from New Zealand to Japan. Writers participate in local meet-ups or log in to the forums to commiserate over writer’s block, join in ten-minute “word wars,” and swap tips for upping their word count. At the end of the month, whether they’ve reached 50,000 or not, participants can go home knowing they’ve attempted something that few people ever dare—to put aside the thousands of daily obligations and distractions in order to tell the stories that they hold inside.

Lisa Frankfort is a licensed therapist, the director of a mental health clinic, and the author of two self-help books. She always wanted to write fiction, but says, “I was very affected by this idea of inspiration. I had to be inspired in order to write. I just thought that was how it worked.” Now, after participating in NaNoWriMo (as it is affectionately known), she believes in sitting down every day and committing to the work of writing. “Creativity begets creativity, and if you keep going, it generates something.”

For Hankemeier, the hardest thing was to physically sit still for several hours a day to work on her novel, since she was used to a routine of yoga and long walks. It was hard, too, to rid herself of distractions. “There’s just so many things on your mind, and you’re used to doing so much, and you don’t realize it,” she says.

About halfway through the month, however, something changed. Other obligations “just started to fall away,” she says. She was slowly beginning to give herself permission to work on a project that was important to her. Friends encouraged her. She made time. She wrote. And by November 30, she had completed a novel.

Over the last ten years, NaNoWriMo has undergone a rollercoaster expansion. The website was unveiled in the event’s second year, bringing in a modest number of aspiring novelists. But during year three, participation ballooned from 140 to over five thousand—and since the sign-up process was not yet automated, founder Chris Baty had to enter each participant into the site manually. That was the year that the NaNoWriMo staff began accepting donations to keep the web site running. By 2004, in the event’s sixth year, they were bringing in enough donations to form a partnership with a charity known as Room to Read. That year they raised enough to build children’s libraries in three Cambodian villages. Also that year, Baty published his guide to NaNoWriMo, known as “No Plot? No Problem!” In 2005, the Young Writers’ Program was founded, creating a simple way for classrooms to participate in their own novel-writing adventures with kids setting their own word-count goals. In 2006, Baty created the Office of Letters and Light as a nonprofit organization to run NaNoWriMo and possibly, in the future, other events as well. Somehow, in the course of eight years, Baty had risen from a regular guy with a “what if” idea to become an entrepreneur, published author, charity fund-raiser, and non-profit director. But then again, pushing your limits and finding out what you can do are just another part of the NaNoWriMo experience.

Robert Shattuck is one of those who don’t finish. A San Francisco State creative writing alum, Shattuck ended the month at around 16,000 words. “If you could get paid for procrastinating,” he says, “I’d be a millionaire.” It wasn’t just the temptation of e-mail, though. Shattuck’s goal for the month was to transform a previously written screenplay into a novel, and because he had already decided on a structure, he found it nearly impossible to “let it have a new flow, a new life.” “Tell this to everybody,” he says. “It was a mistake to try and rewrite something I’d done before.” Still, though, Shattuck remains positive about his venture, because it got him writing. “I saw that I could actually do it,” he says. “I never thought I’d even get to 15,000.”

Frankfort once had a similar experience. During her first NaNoWriMo three years ago, she barely reached ten thousand words—forget fifty. But it was a start. “Chris Baty says if you only write five thousand words in November, that’s five thousand more than you would have written otherwise,” she says. With that in mind, she returned to her unfinished novel, writing twenty hours a week until it was complete. Now she’s revising her fourth draft and seeking agent representation—something she says she may never have achieved without the help of NaNoWriMo’s let-it-all-hang-out philosophy.

This year, Frankfort’s novel, Insufficiency, tells the story of an adolescent boy who witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ marriage. She says that she doesn’t base her characters on anyone she knows, but her experiences as a therapist do fuel her interest in psychological, character-driven works. She’s a seasoned novelist, thanks to NaNoWriMo. “The experience has been transformative for me as a writer,” she says. “I feel like a writer.”

With 21,719 winners in 2008, it seems that a lot of people are feeling like writers right about now. That’s the power of NaNoWriMo—to bring people together, to dare them to stretch their limits, and finally to make them into writers.