What can't be done in 30 days? Give a smoker 30 days and there's a chance he can quit. Walk a mile every day for 30 days and your jeans will fit bitter. Clean one thing per day in your house and (Flash! Subliminal message! Flash!) your wife will be really happy.

See, nearly anything is possible with time, stick-to-it-ness, and a deadline. The time is already available. I think there's another 30 days starting tomorrow.

Then there's determination. That depends on the person and which reward is more desirable: the long-term one that will come after the 30 days, or the immediate one that will come with failure.

If a smoker sneaks a smoke, his reward is a cigarette. If a walker hits the snooze button, it's extra sleep. If a spouse lets the laundry pile grow, it's... well, no one wins there, do they?

The key seems to be that dirty eight-letter word "deadline." A date to be circled on the calendar. Results are more likely if someone forces your concentration by saying, "OK, you start now and you finish then."

That's why we have regularly scheduled national observances like the Great American Smoke-out in November and National Fitness Month in May. Even "Clean For Your Spouse Month" is going on right now. Go ahead, grab a mop. Celebrate!

November is National Novel Writing Month and there's a group of people who take that a little more seriously than most. They oversee a 30-day writing marathon called NaNoWriMo.

The goal: to write a complete 50,000 word/175-page novel in 30 days.

It may be an extreme way to approach November. Sort of like buying a turkey farm in June for National Turkey Lovers Month or moving to Leipzig in May to properly observe Learn German Month.

The NaNoWriMo "movement" was started in 1999 by Chris Baty, a heavy coffee drinking Californian who was bored, with a lackluster social life. He and a few friends figured guys who wrote novels probably got more dates, so he found 20 other people willing to try "crash-noveling" and NaNoWriMo was born. That year, six novels were written.

The number of participants has jumped each year since and was up to 59,000 in 2005. They expect 70,000 this year.

The participants are kids, adults, men and women. Some are writers already, some have nothing better to do, and others suspect they have the great American novel buried somewhere in their minds. They may be delusional, but if nothing else, they can eliminate that as a possible source of the voices in their heads.

There are NaNoWriMo groupies all over the world. Some gather together in houses or libraries or coffee shops. Armed with caffeine, these little support groups ignore each other together, typing furiously on laptops or filling notebooks with pencil scratchings.

The word goal averages out to just over 1,600 words per day. It's a commitment to write a bunch of junk, really. With that time crunch, the focus is definitely quantity over quality. And any satisfaction won't likely come from writing a best-seller-but from writing a word-count equivalent to a best-seller.

Not that there haven't been any real book sales from it. Nine stories have been sold to "big" publishing houses.

There's no time for extensive research or editing, which is the point. The latter has to be the No. 2 reason-the first being just not writing-why many books (and newspaper columns) don't get written. Self-editing: ripping it apart before putting it together.

If 30 days are spent writing and the result is horrible, well, at least there's a big fat gold star-actually a certificate-for finishing. If it's horrible with slight potential, then your internal editor can show his face. At that point, it's much more productive, as there are now a lot of words there to cut.

It's free to sign up at www.nanowrimo.com. (They'll take donations and 50 percent goes to building libraries for kids.) There are no penalties or punishments for not finishing. It's a chance to add your own words to the more than 700 million others that are going to be logged. Just to see if you can.

In the least, it's a creative outlet and a viable excuse for not getting around to scrubbing the toilet-beyond the usual excuses of work, kids, etc.

Priorities, after all.