Ready, Set, Write

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted October 26, 2004.

In November of 2003, 25,000 caffeine-fueled scribes sat down to complete a novel in the course of a month. Over 3,500 of them met their goal: 50,000 words by midnight, Nov. 30. Now, as November rolls around again, a whole slew of budding novelists are priming their speed-typing and sharpening pencils.

Chris Baty, a proud resident of Oakland, Calif., is responsible for this exercise in absurdity (or lyricism, or post-modernism, or banality). Baty has been heading up National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in which participants, with motivation from cohorts around the world connected through the Web site, complete a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. Since founding the escapade in 1999, Baty claims he “has set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere.”

Baty is a freelance writer by trade; his work has appeared in the Washington Post, the SF Weekly, the Minneapolis City Pages, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. When not bossing strangers around, Chris spends debilitating amounts of time in coffee shops and record stores. His companion guide to NaNoWriMo, "No Plot? No Problem!" (Chronicle Books) has just been published, and writers around the world are cracking their knuckles, stocking up on coffee and getting ready to write.

Jordan Rosenfeld: Where did you get the idea for National Novel Writing Month?

Chris Baty: Back in June of 1999 I had just finished a writing project and had that overly-ambitious energy that comes from being done with something large. Instead of doing what I should have done, which was to rest for awhile, my immediate thought was to do something bigger. Thankfully I'm blessed with friends who tend to say yes when they should probably say no. I convinced 20 others that we should write a novel in a month. None of us expected that we would write master works, or even passable novels. Mediocre was definitely the highest that we were hoping for. But it turned into something much larger than that over the years.

How did you go to the next phase, starting this massive Web site?

Well, we did have a Web site that first year, something I uploaded to some generic server using Microsoft Word's save-as-HTML feature. That first year was such a revelation where, although we had very low expectations—six of us ended up writing 50,000 words and none of us had seen ourselves as novel writers or even fiction writers—it was a chance to spend a month romping around in our imaginations, which is hard to get the time to do. Before that experience I felt you had to be a professional novelist and have a card that presented your affiliation with some global noveling organization. I thought you needed some sort of training for that. You don't. If you spend a month writing a novel, plot happens.

It was such an eye opening experience that I thought, if I can do this and my friends can do this, anybody can do this and so we set out the following year to do it again. I had a friend offer to make an actual Web site at an actual domain. At that point I thought that was a way overly-ambitious plan. But the second year we went from 21 to 141 people and then it just kept going.

When you started getting up in the numbers of over 5,000 people—and I know it's quite a bit over that now—did you experience overwhelm or were you excited?

I was simultaneously excited and overwhelmed. The nervous breakdown happened at year three where we still had the same site from year two, but everything was done by hand, by me. When we hit 5000 it involved a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of kindhearted friends who put their life and limb on the line. There have been a lot of growing pains, where it's always exciting but also totally terrifying, like the whole thing was going to implode. There never was a master plan from the get-go to bring literary empowerment and fiction writing to the world; it's been more about fun.

The rate at which it has grown has a lot to do with the fact that it's Web-based, don't you think?

NaNoWriMo couldn't exist without the internet. But I see it as a Web-enabled event, because the real events take place in Detroit, Stockholm, Tokyo, London, where individual NaNoWriMo chapters are getting together in bars, libraries and coffee shops giving each other the support that helps you get through this mammoth undertaking. When people refer to NaNoWriMo as a Web site, I disagree; it's a real-world face-to-face experience, facilitated by the website.

Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a freelance writer living in Northern California and the host of Word by Word: Conversations with Writers, on KRCB Radio.

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