It's November, so that means the social web is alive with the cries and curses of novice writers, taking up the call from this year's National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as it's known – which long since stopped being a national event unique to the United States, and became an internet-wide phenomenon. Launched in 1999 with just 21 writers, this year saw more than 200,000 signed up by 1 November. All have accepted the challenge of writing 50,000 words by the end of the month – although how many will complete that remains, as always, to be seen.

The competition does not focus on any particular style – or indeed quality. Rather, it encourages writers to just get the words down, and tune them later. Throughout, they're stimulated with small inspirations and challenges, such as one-line "NaNoWriMoOpeners", and 15-minute daily sprints co-ordinated on Twitter. Those who complete and submit the allotted 50K by the end of the month are declared "winners", the only prize being the satisfaction of having done the work. Few challenges will produce complete novels, although they may be the start of them – Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus began as a November project and went on to spend time in the bestseller lists in 2011.

NaNoWriMo is also a product of that most pervasive and oft-maligned trend bred by the internet: gamification, the process by which any task, tedious or otherwise, might be made more attractive by the addition of scores, badges or prizes. The trend runs all the way from household chores (the mighty Chore Wars) to David Cameron's "Nudge Unit", which tries to incentivise people to file taxes on time, or eat less. In NaNoWriMo's case, it's both the very public word counts displayed on participants' profiles and the cheers of their fellow competitors that spur them on. And all writers can do with that kind of encouragement.