High school students burn the midnight oil during finals week, cursing the world for five-page essays. Graduate students spend months gathering information, completing interviews, and preparing for dissertations. Novelists spend years researching a single topic, traveling the world to "make the reader feel" what they are writing about, devouring thesauruses and dictionaries to create the perfect sentence within a chapter, chapter within a book, book within a series.

NaNoWriMo writers, however, are a different breed of writers. They volunteer and succeed, sometimes, from pressure. The pressure of writing a fifty-thousand word book in not decades, not years, not even one year. Their goal: to write one complete 175-page book, from November 1 to November 30. One book written in one month.

National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org), which takes place every November, is celebrating its 11th year. Boasting an ever- evolving website that writers use to post novels, the main goal in November is to get people writing. NaNo is a community that allows participants to find advice, ask questions, and talk to fellow writers facing the same challenges. A Facebook for writers, NaNoWriMo.org collects donations for other organizations to raise writing among all people.

The Young Writer's Program, a NaNo for younger students with no minimum word count, also takes place in November while in April of every year a different challenge lures writers. In April 2007, NaNo added Script Frenzy to their writing competitions, which offers the same type of challenge to script writers NaNo offers to novelists. But NaNoWriMo is more than a writing website. It is a community and works every year to make the world a better place for writers and to inspire, help, and guide aspiring writers reach their goals.

"One of the best things for me is reading the pep talks by Chris and the various delightful authors he recruits each year," eight-time NaNo winner Marrije Schaake, 41, from Utrech, Netherlands says. "Every writer has struggles with writing their book, and every one of them has good tips and war stories and motivational things to say. And I love that, I love finding out that we share such a wonderful experience."

What started as a very small organization in one person's apartment in the Bay Area has grown into a non-profit with headquarters in Oakland, CA while becoming a national sensation. Writers around the world participate in NaNoWriMo every year via a website that is always evolving to keep up with the constantly increasing participants. Published writers and first-time novelists join the site that is everywhere in the world and has created more than just novels. "I joined NaNoWriMo because I am a graduate student and want to practice writing long works," SFSU student Sarah McGuire says. "I have also wanted to try to write so I thought this would be good practice."

The Piker Press, which began in the spring of 2002 with the goal to keep writers writing, is an e-zine and smaller version of NaNo that lets writers (and readers) enjoy all forms of writing. Sand Pilarski, the Managing Editor of The Piker Press, feels the most important part of writing is, writing.

"I like to encourage people to just tell their stories, throw them out there, let them fly," she says. "It's like singing, or painting - people are afraid to sing or paint for fear they won't be good enough. Artists need to create; we're writers and we need to write, otherwise all those words will lie alone and dusty in the forgotten closets of our hearts and that would be the unhappiest of endings to any writer's story."

But writing a book in a month is not something to take lightly. Like a runner spending months preparing for a 26.2 mile marathon, NaNo can mean preparation before with plots, characters, and a storyline prepared. But it can also mean diving in headfirst with no outline and no idea as to where a story will lead the writer, but that is what makes it so fun and at the same time, worth it. "Accepting that what I am writing will not be any good, since it's only a first draft, and pushing on anyway is the hardest part of writing a novel in one month," Schaake explains.

NaNo has inspired many writers to take that first step in completing a novel, to get the thought-process flowing, and to get the hands used to typing. As coffee shops around the world fill with writers tweaking on caffeine, talking to themselves, and staring off into space, and bedroom lights stay on until the wee hours of the morning, it can be easy to forget why a person would take on such a challenge but, as Pilarski says, "after a couple of days of writing, I start to see so many lovely details in the world. It suddenly becomes much more interesting and special, and I love that. It's made me realize that I could actually do something as life-changing and outrageous as writing a novel. "I looked at the site and realized that no one ever had to see what I wrote and I was suddenly possessed [with] a sweaty-palmed desire to tell a story."[X]