When Chris Baty came up with the idea for National Novel Writing Month in 1999, he accidentally created a movement. Partly because it answers the age-old question of what’s in a name (more on that below), but mostly because it’s an enticing, extremely relatable challenge. We’d all like to think we’ve got a novel or ten in us. NaNoWriMo takes that universal feeling and says, “Okay, let’s see it.”
Chris stepped back from running the organization a few years ago and is now focusing on writing (he’s authored one book and co-authored another) teaching at Stanford, and designing, all while being a self-described mascot for NaNoWriMo. I talked to Chris Baty on the phone between his countless other speaking engagements, interviews, and working on his own NaNo project (he still participates every year), and I quickly got swept up in how exciting and strangely social writing can be, and after our conversation, it was obvious why National Novel Writing Month became such A Thing.
How has the shift been from running the organization to being able to poke your head in on a more casual basis?
The first six months or so, it was kind of this feeling that I had sort of lost my family or something. And it was like, “Wait, who am I now?” But it’s been really nice over the last three years. I feel like I’ve become sort of a NaNoWriMo mascot, which is great. The best job on the planet. I still get to travel around and spread the high-velocity novel-writing gospel and have the time to meet the people who are writing. Any time you get involved with something, and it grows, you end up spending a lot of time administering the organization, and that’s really your job. It’s been nice to step out a little bit and go to write-ins… and this week I’m going to an elementary school where 4th and 5th graders are doing National Novel Writing Month and I’m going to their kickoff party, and I just wouldn’t have had time to do that in the past.
I didn’t know kids that young were getting involved.
Oh my gosh, we have kindergardeners who are getting involved, with heavy, heavy assistance from their teachers, of course, but it’s been really cool.
So you still participate each year.
Every year, yeah.
So what are you working on this year, and how’s it going?
This year I thought I was working on one story, and then November 1st rolled around, and I was out getting my wife a bagel, and I suddenly had this other idea. I’m doing a young adult novel and I’m 3400 words into it. I need to write today, but otherwise I’m on track. And I really like it. I think it will not suck too badly.
Was it the bagel, or was it the walk?
I think it was the bagel. Being that close to such a delicious bagel can really incite visions of fiction in people’s brains.
This might be an opportunity to you to get into spokesmanship. So what have been the fates of your previous fifteen projects?
I would say that of the fifteen I’ve written, probably four of them have made me think, “Oh, that could be a pretty good book. And the others… I have definitely learned something from all of them, and I love all of them, but I have not looked at most of them again. I’ve revised a couple of them, spent a good chunk of time on them and they’re not quite there yet. I continually also get distracted by the shiny optimism of the new novel. I’m working on one that I wrote two years that I really love about two monsters who find a VHS tape and set out in the human world to return it. It’s obviously going to win a Pultitzer Prize any day now. So I’m working on revising that one, and I took a break to write a new novel, but I’ll get back to that one and hopefully in the next six-to-nine months I’ll have that in a place where I can share.
Do you think it’s a pretty common misconception that people, especially those who aren’t participating, assume that people are trying to write—from beginning to end—a novel?
Right. It should really be called “National First Draft of a Novel Writing Month”, but that acronym doesn’t quite roll of the tongue the same way. I do think that some people who haven’t written long-form fiction before have the hope that you can just sit down and—if you’re really talented—it would just sort of tumble out perfectly.
I think that most people realize that the first draft of anything is shit, but I think it’s beautiful shit. I see National Novel Writing Month as a chance to write one of these beautiful but flawed stories that I think we all have in us, and you have to start with that first draft.
A lot of people who do National Novel Writing Month do it because they just love that first draft. They don’t really have any intention of sharing with anybody or publishing it. For them it’s just this idea of spending thirty days exploring their imaginations, and that’s what they want to get out of it.
For people who are using this as the first step towards publication, most of them realize that you write it in a month, but you’re really going to end up spending a long time, at least a year, probably, going through a series of drafts, and sharing with readers, and making it better before it heads out to the world.
You just reminded me of one of my favorite things about NaNoWriMo. The name. There’s an assumption that comes with National Novel Writing Month. How it’s a thing because you said it’s a thing.
It’s hilarious, because when I named it, there were twenty-one of us, all of us living in the Bay Area. None of us knew how to write a novel. And that name was almost this banner that we were all riding into battle under, and the only thing keeping us upright at times. “Well, we are participants in National Novel Writing Month.” Over time, especially early on, it was really helpful in giving people—people who didn’t know it was just a bunch of over-caffeinated yahoos who were running the event out of a living room—it gave them the sense of—oh, this must be a nationally-vetted literacy initiative. Because surely you can’t just take the name ‘National Whatever Month’. There has to be some control over that, right? And thankfully there isn’t any control over that.
And it’s grown into the name.
Exactly, and very quickly, it’s actually become international. It’s been really wonderful to see writers in thirty countries around the world writing books in Icelandic, and Arabic, and Chinese… It’s amazing to go to the site and into the regional lounges and see people writing all these great stories in all of these different languages.
A lot of people love the spirit of NaNoWriMo, but they do their own thing with it. They’re called ‘rebels’. If they’re writing a script, a collection of stories, a novella with music. How do you personally feel about people rebelling against the construct?
I love it. I really think that the goal is to get people a little bit of encouragement to be creative and get one of these projects written. There’s such an amazingly powerful thing that happens when you get a group of people together and they’re all attempting this goal of getting something big accomplished. And you can tap into that even if you’re not writing a novel. To me, the biggest group in need of this is people who are trying write PhD dissertations. If you’re trying to write your doctoral dissertation, you need help. It’s the worst case scenario where you don’t have a strict deadline, the professor is probably like, “Yeah, whatever, get it to me.”
We created the rebel category to make sure that those people felt like they had a home. There were some participants who would say, “Oh, you’re writing a screenplay. You shouldn’t validate and get the winner’s certificate. It may be 50,000 words, but it’s not 50,000 words of a novel.” We wanted to make it clear that the event is open to everybody, and everybody has different goals that they want to achieve in a month.
How do you keep the inner editor at bay when you’re trying to just get that first draft out? (Note: this and the following question were asked in a post last week to Audrey Redpath of Creative Help and to the group of writers we’re following this month)
You know, at this point I’ve gotten so good at lowering my expectations for myself, quality-wise, which is such a blessing.
When you write for quantity instead of quality, you end up getting both. Because you stop self-censoring and you stop second-guessing and just let the story come alive.
When it comes to a first draft, I think that’s the best thing you can do. You do need that inner editor on the second draft and third draft, and it’s an amazing helper when it comes to revising things that have already been written, but it’s really a nuisance when you’re trying to come up with something fresh, because it will try to tear everything apart. The most important thing you can do is focus on getting a beginning, a middle, and and end down and know that you can fix it in December.
How do you push through that wall when you feel like it’s not going well and you should just call it?
I think it’s important to know that everybody goes through it.
The thing I’ve discovered is that if you just keep writing, and just commit to going, “Yep. This sucks, and I’m just going to keep sucking. I’m going to write 1,667 words that suck today, and I’ll do it tomorrow if I have to.” After a little while, a story has a way of kind of writing itself. Things get back on track, and you fall back in love with the story that you were sure was dead.
Maybe you kill of your main character who was annoying you and the secondary character becomes the main character, or the villain becomes the main character. I think stories have a way of finding their own footing as long as you keep writing.
The other thing I’d say is to go to National Novel Writing Month write-ins. In almost every English-speaking city or town in the world, there are people getting together most nights of the week, in coffee shops and libraries, and keeping each other company while they write. And nothing makes it easier to get writing done than having a little bit of camaraderie.
I think that’s one of the most appealing things about this. That it injects a social element to something that’s usually a very solitary thing.
Exactly! And I was so surprised. I think novel writing is an ideal social activity, in the same way that exercise is. Most people hate to exercise, but if you have a friend to do it with you, suddenly it’s not half bad. Running only sucks half as bad as it usually does when you have somebody there keeping the pace. I think that’s the reason that all of the speed records in cycling get broken in group settings, when people are doing the same thing at the same time. It helps keep you focused and keeps pushing you forward.
It’s too late to officially participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but the spirit of it is constant. If you feel that you’ve got a great novel (or screenplay or album or manual or film) in you, set up some structure for yourself. A marathon is still a race. Commit to a certain amount of words or hours and push yourself. Get it out. And once you get it out, we’ll help you get it out there.