I’ve said that writing fiction is the most painful thing I’ve ever done — and I’ve given birth to three children. I’m only half kidding.
But, seriously, most writers know that going from blank page to fully developed novel is no easy task. Thanks to Chris Baty and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), however, the process is slightly less difficult — albeit it in a “let’s all get our wisdom teeth pulled out together without anesthesia” kind of way. As of this writing, there are more than 226,000 people signed up to participate in this year’s 30-day sprint to noveldom.
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As testament to the magnetic pull of unwritten prose, Baty in 2012 stepped down from the organization he founded to have more time for what he spent 12 years encouraging hundreds of thousands of people on six continents to do. Here, the author of two novel-writing guides takes a break from his own literary pursuits to discuss what it’s like to launch a cultural phenomenon and what it really takes to cross the NaNoWriMo finish line.
First off, I’m kind of one of those people that tends to have a lot of bad ideas. So I love coming up with these kinds of ridiculous ideas and then forcing my friends to do it, and National Novel Writing Month was very much in keeping with that. I was 26 years old, and I absolutely loved books and had a group of book-loving friends, but none of us had written fiction before, much less book-length fiction. But I think this idea just seemed appealing in that it was a good opportunity to get together. The very first year we did it [in 1999], it was July. So we all had a lot of free time. I never in a million years thought that it was going to become an annual event. I thought we were going to do it once, that we would all spectacularly fail — probably in the first week — and then we would sort of never talk about it again.
| “I never in a million years thought it was going to become an annual event. I thought we were going to do it once, that we would all spectacularly fail, and then we would never talk about it again.” |
The first year, six of us (the group of us that were getting together each night and writing) all crossed the 50,000-word finish line. The books were definitely bad books, but they weren’t irredeemably bad. They had potential, and that’s when I was like, “OK, I’m going to do this again.” The next year we moved it to November just because nobody was available in July the next year. And I sent out the email again, and it got forwarded, and we grew to 140 people. The next year it went to 5,000, and it just kind of took off from there.
If you had to credit one single catalyst as the reason for NaNoWriMo’s breakout success — in the pre-social-media era — what would it be?
The amazing thing is it was truly word of mouth in a time when there were not a lot of easy ways to spread [the word]. It was back when the main social networking tool was email. And also, the year when it really kind of exploded was the third year, and that was 2001, and blogs were just starting to come into their own. I think that National Novel Writing Month was helped by the fact that suddenly there was this category of websites called a blog, which were to be updated regularly, so people needed things to write about. And then a lot of the people who would write about it just to have a blog post would end up blogging about the process. That’s when people started watching folks who had never written a book before really set aside a month of time for it and get a lot out of it.
What advice do you have for someone else who has a great idea to share with the world? What’s the best way to get it to the masses?
Well, the first thing I would say is that you absolutely have to pursue it because whatever it is people have been waiting for it. I never would have dreamed that of all of the bad ideas I’ve had, the one that would completely change my life is this idea that we’re going to get strangers to write novels in a month. It just does not seem possible. But then [I did] it, and it opened part of myself that I didn’t know was there. It completely changed the way I saw the potential in everyone around me. And these little things really can change lives all over the world. So get it out there.
| “Making sure you stick with something long enough to give it a chance to start going and growing is really important.” |
The second thing is [that] you have to commit to the long game. You really do need to be set on doing it a couple times because it just takes time to build. If I had stopped after the second year I would have said, “Yep, I was right. About 140 people, that’s the most people [I’ll get].” And then this avalanche comes just seemingly out of nowhere. You make that leap from 140 [members] to 5,000 — at that point, the snowball is rolling. It just sustains its own momentum. Making sure you stick with something long enough to give it a chance to start going and growing is really important.
The NaNoWriMo concept kind of suggests that anyone can write a book. Do you think this is true?
Oh my god, yeah. And I think everybody can write dozens of novels. You look back to the time when we were kids, and if you gave me a stick that I could make into a toy, I was basically good for seven hours. We were all so imaginative at a young age, just sort of running amuck in our imaginations and pretending. All of that is still in us. When we hit puberty, we start to do this thing where we ask, “Am I good at this?” We’re looking around and we’re seeing other people who are better than us at these things. That’s when we start to shut down those parts of ourselves. We have internalized this sense of, “Novels are not written by people like me; novels are written by novelists.” And it turns out novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. Everybody can do it, and everybody should do it.
To me, it feels like most people who take part in National Novel Writing Month are doing this just to have this month-long adventure where they do get to lose themselves in their imagination and reconnect with that spontaneous, creative, joyful, making, doing part of themselves that as adults we don’t tend to make time for. It’s not about hitting The New York Times bestseller list. It is about this giddy sense of fun that comes when you set aside time to just make stuff.
| “We have internalized this sense of, ‘Novels are not written by people like me; novels are written by novelists.’ [They] are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels.” |
What is more important to your legacy — that you are remembered for founding NaNoWriMo or for your writing?
You know, I would be so happy if my legacy was that I founded National Novel Writing Month. I just think I will be proud for the rest of my life and feel so incredibly lucky to have been involved in it. And if that’s it, if I never publish a novel or sell a screenplay or ever get anything else done, I just feel so lucky. But, for me personally, I do need one or two novels. I feel like that will be also a hugely satisfying feeling. Whether or not it ever is read by anybody other than my mom and my dad is almost irrelevant to me at this point. I just really want to finish it, and I feel like then, at that point, the angels will sing, there will be a lot of dancing in the streets of Berkeley.
Chris Baty’s tips for writing a book in 30 days:
1. Lower your expectations. “Writers put a lot of pressure on themselves, and they look at this first draft as sort of a bellwether about the future potential of that book. Inevitably, first drafts are disastrous. Every book that we’ve loved probably started out as a completely nonsensical, flawed piece of writing. I think you really have to shoot for completion rather than perfection.”
2. Make it a social event. “Our lives are just so crazy and busy with work and school and family that the only way that you’re going to build accountability into the system is to have a support network. Part of that is making sure that your friends and family know that you’re doing this crazy thing for a month. I always encourage people to get on Facebook [and] declare your intentions.”
3. Enlist a writing buddy. It pays to have “a friend or family member or somebody that maybe they met on a NaNoWriMo message board,” as a writing buddy,” says Baty. “If they know that there’s one other person out there that they can swap word counts with and encourage, they are so much more likely to make it through to end of the book and win the challenge.
Andrea Williams is a freelance writer based in Nashville. Follow her at @AndreaWillWrite.
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