CELEBRATING Twenty YEARS OF NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo started in July, 1999 (yes, July, not November), when founder Chris Baty invited 20 of his friends to join him on an audacious creative venture: to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month.

Since then, those 20 friends have grown into a global community of writers who write together in various ways throughout the year, and they’ve put up some big numbers:

1,000+ NOVELS EITHER TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED OR SELFPUBLISHED AFTER NANOWRIMO

24,806,635,218 WORDS HAVE BEEN RECORDED ON THE NANOWRIMO WEBSITE

1,589 AVERAGE NUMBER OF YEARS IT WOULD TAKE YOU TO COUNT TO 24,806,635,218

3,000,000+ PEOPLE HAVE SIGNED UP TO WRITE

200+ COUNTRIES WITH NANOWRIMO PARTICIPANTS

7 CONTINENTS THAT HOST NANOWRIMO WRITERS (YES, INCLUDING ANTARCTICA)

We’re toasting 20 years of novel-writing chutzpah, motivation, and derring-do by going down NaNoWriMo’s memory lane.

1999

Chris Baty decided he wanted to write a novel and estimated that the most slender novels on his bookshelf – think The Great Gatsby – are approximately 50,000 words. He challenged 20 friends to write a novel with him that July, and they gathered together in coffeeshops each night to write together.

“After the noveling ended on August 1, my sense of what was possible for myself, and those around me, was forever changed. If my friends and I could write passable novels in a month, I knew anyone could do it.”
—Chris Baty

2000

NaNoWriMo’s original 21 participants swelled to 140 participants who learn this simple groundbreaking formula: . They also