NaNoWriMo
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NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is every November since 1998. Participants take part in a writing challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
There are no entry fees and no judgements or prizes. Everyone who actually gets a novel finished wins ... a finished novel draft.
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[edit] The Rules
One that causes first-timers some anguish is that it must be an entirely new work on which you have nothing written before the midnight start of 1 November. "Can't I use this for my partially-begun novel?" There are other writing dares or writing challenge groups you can use for this. Once you get over trying to control the rules, you will find that it is liberating to begin something absolutely fresh and wide-open. It makes it easier (for most people) to speed-draft if there are no fences, no limits of what is already written.
Before November, however, you can do as much background prep as you can, including character bios, scene descriptions, maps, invented biospheres, etc. You can do detailed plot outlines, if you are a plotter. You can write the prequel stories to this novel, just don't write this novel yet.
You stop writing and claim your wordage by midnight, 30 November, Pacific Coast Time. Those lying west of that time zone, who feel cheated of a few hours, should simply start at PCT rather than their own time. They have a robot word-counter which gives official word-counts of TXT files.
Don't worry about plagiarism. No one saves them or goes through the 30,000 submitted looking for yours to steal. This would be worse than crawling through slushpiles, as blitz drafts are notoriously far from publishable.
The story is supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not just be, say, 50k of the beginning or middle of a 150k story.
Everything runs on the honor system. If you say you wrote it, rather than grabbing a chunk of something off Project Gutenberg to throw at the robot word-counter, you did. As is often said of cheating, "you only hurt yourself" because the purpose is not to pose around claiming to have done it, but to experience the rush, absorbtion, and growth of writing a novel. For some, the reward is having a 50k skeleton draft they can expand and revise.
[edit] Attitudes
Not everyone does NNWM for the same reasons. There's room in its cooperative anarchy for all sorts of writers.
Primary are the NaNoHobbyists, who don't in the least really expect to publish, but do want the fun of trying to actually construct something like a novel. The plot may include dares from others to include various items, from busty ninja pirate cabbages to secret passages.
NaNoGamers are here to meet the challenge of 50k more than to write a usable novel. They follow all the rules, but hold that typing "badger badger badger ..." until something else comes to mind counts. On the basis of "art is anything the artist claims is art," this works. They count long quotes provided they are keyed in, not pasted in.
Then, if we can excuse the phrase, there are NaNoWriters who actually hope to get a working draft out of this. They have less gleeful fun, probably, as they take their work so seriously. A certain number of professionals do this, and a certain number of NNNWM novels have been first-sold novels for their writers.
