In July, 1999, twenty-one relatively young people with nothing better to do decided to try writing novels in a month. Six of them actually did it. Eight years later, in November, 2006, nearly 13,000 crossed that same finish line (almost 80,000 gave it a shot.) Last year (2006) the participants logged a total of over 982,000,000 words — the expectation is that we’ll break 1,000,000,000 this year. I’ll be contributing my 50,000 this year, as I did in 2004, 2005, and 2006. (Promo: You can do it too!)

In August, 2005, President Hinckley challenged members of the Church to read (or re-read) the Book of Mormon, telling us that we could finish by the end of the year if we started right then. Statistical information for the participants in this challenge was regrettably impossible to obtain. ^_^ However, we have plenty of signs indicating that people responded to this challenge who might not have read the Book of Mormon that year (or might really have benefited from re-reading it when they didn’t intend to.) Twice as many copies of Book of Mormon products were sold by Covenant stores (between August and December, 2005) than in previous years, anyway.

Why do such challenges work? What makes people not only say “I will sacrifice ludicrous amounts of time and energy in order to achieve a goal that I have never really been able to accomplish in a seemingly impossibly short period of time” but also enjoy the process? It shouldn’t surprise us that someone can write 50,000 words in thirty days (now those novel-in-a-day people are impressive, assuming they’re actually writing coherent English sentences and so forth,) and 525 pages of reading (even if it’s slightly opaque language) in five months isn’t that huge an accomplishment, either. What impresses and surprises me is that people, who by and large have agreed that this goal is both worthy and something they want to do, who have nonetheless failed to do it (often despite dozens of tries: how many Mormons have memorized the better part of 1 Nephi?), are given this challenge, which isn’t very different from the goals they’ve already set for themselves, and it seemingly magically gives them the power to accomplish what they set out to do but never did (could?) before.

At the end of NaNoWriMo last year, the founder of it all (Chris Baty, whose official bio says he “set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere,”) challenged everyone involved to join him in a year of “big, fun, scary adventures.” I think he decided to finally learn some Spanish. I’ll probably decide to finally apply to grad school, after NaNo this year (I need to figure out how to get references, 6 years since my last class in my major and after 3 years of working temp jobs and for my own mother.) Other people have bungee-jumped, run marathons, and actually finished their NaNo novels (50k words is a little short — the first Harry Potter book clocks in at closer to 77k.) And why not? It doesn’t really fit in with what I understand about resource mobilization theory, but theories didn’t help me win NaNo three times, either. ^_^