Whatever you do, you participants in National Novel Writing Month [NaNoWriMo], do not pick up a copy of John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives before reaching your minimum of 50,000 words by 11:59:59 pm (local time) on November 30.

At this midway point between the event's kickoff at 12:00 am on November 1 and its wrap-up, we’re here to shine a light on the end of the tunnel. In your most delirious or discouraged moments of adrenaline-fueled literary output, know that this book bulging with priceless insight, humor, and gossip waits on the other side.

All you have to do in order to reap its rewards? Continue to crank out, on average, 1,667 words per day over the course of the month to create the first draft of a novel or novel-in-progress. (Pick up this absorbing collection before you meet your goal, and risk getting derailed by its edifying stories.) Granted, 50,000 words makes for a short novel, but if it was good enough for F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby is about that long), it’s good enough for you.

“Good enough” might as well be an alternate mantra for NaNoWriMo, which bills itself as “a month of literary abandon” and “the largest writing community in the world.” With its associated Camp NaNoWriMo and Young Writers Program, also run by the Berkeley-based nonprofit The Office of Letters and Light, NaNoWriMo is a platform for productivity -- not perfection.

In NaNoWriMo’s FAQs, they address the issue of quantity over quality in answer to the question “If I’m just mindlessly writing 50,000 words, why bother? Why not just write a real novel later, when I have more time?” with this answer:

“Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you’ll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and an ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you’d never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst it, there will be beauty. A lot of it.”

Between its deadline, online support (established writers including James Patterson and Lev Grossman have signed on to offer pep talks this month), and encouraging history (conventionally published novels started during NaNoWriMo include New York Times bestsellers Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern), NaNoWriMo makes the prospect of writing and publishing a novel accessible. Its democratization of those steps has attracted critics, of course -- people who want the Novel, with a capital N, to remain on a mostly out-of-reach pedestal.

One might think that, with his pedigree, John Sutherland would be among the naysayers. The Lives of the Novelists author is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College London and has served as chairman of the Booker Prize Committee, but those posts only seem to enhance his appreciation for genre fiction -- “good trash” is among his highest compliments. Sutherland supports this sentiment of excessive output in writing with his book’s rich oeuvre of anecdotes. The novelist Patricia Highsmith wrote the first draft of Strangers on a Train during one month at the artist colony Yaddo, he reminds us. The first draft of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, he cites her publisher’s rewrite team as saying, “was ‘hardly written in English’ and it took a lot of labour to bring it up to a standard of ‘readable mediocrity.’”

If readable mediocrity is all you’ve got to show at the end of NaNoWriMo, so be it. You’ll also have Sutherland’s brilliant book to inspire you for next year’s fresh start, and a first draft to polish between now and then.