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 An E-Novel Idea
Write a 50,000-word book in 30 days? Impossible, you say? This month, 100,000 people will try to prove you wrong. By Angela Chang
Chris Baty knows how to make you work. Because of him, people hide in their bathrooms during Thanksgiving dinner, working to finish their assignments. Others toil nonstop for 30 hours in order to meet their deadlines. Is Baty the scariest boss ever, channeling a The Devil Wears Prada vibe? No, he’s just the creator of National Novel Writing Month.
A former travel and music writer, Baty is the mastermind of a self-described “dumb idea” that, eight years later, has blossomed into a bona fide great one. The concept? Get a group of people who will each commit to writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
“It started as an event for people who, for better or worse, loved books but had no idea what they were doing,” Baty says. This month, NaNoWriMo, as it’s known, begins its ninth round. The writing fest started in 1999 with only 21 contenders but has grown exponentially ever since. Last year, 79,000 people from 69 countries signed up at NaNoWriMo.org, and 13,000 of those managed to cross the finish line. This year, there are expected to be 100,000 participants. These dedicated wannabe novelists will lock themselves away for days and days, typing, scrutinizing, and, no doubt, crying as they strive to meet their word quotas.
Signing up for NaNoWriMo is free, though organizers encourage each writer to donate something to cover administrative and web-hosting costs. Once participants have finished writing their 50,000 (or more) words, they should e-mail their manuscripts to NaNoWriMo for word-count verification. Writers can keep their work private or post excerpts on the group’s website. As soon as the excerpts are in the archives, they’re available for public viewing — and that means publishing houses have access to them.
While dreams of glory and publishing deals surely inspire some of the writers, it’s the NaNoWriMo community’s encouraging, everyone-can-do-it attitude that many find especially appealing. Online forums help writers work through plot snafus, and area coordinators plan local events such as group writing sessions and Thank God It’s Over parties. “The idea of getting together online and being part of a community is very fun and so refreshing,” says Lani Diane Rich, an author who jump-started her career by publishing two of her NaNoWriMo manuscripts.
The rosy atmosphere helps alleviate the pressure would-be authors feel to write something perfect. “We all have such impossibly high expectations of ourselves, but the truth is that every novel that we have loved started out as a miserable first draft,” Baty says. And the whole purpose behind the tight deadline and seemingly impossible word count is to get people writing.
“It’s just getting over the hump and doing that first thing and being able to say, ‘Hey, I’ve written a novel’ — and that’s pretty great,” says Martin McClellan, a web designer who has participated in NaNoWriMo for the past four years and has reached the 50,000-word goal three times. He’s also cowritten a screenplay with his writing partner, Kent Beeson; it placed in the top 100 in Project Greenlight 3.
Emphasizing quantity over quality may seem like a guaranteed way of getting page after page of unreadable drivel. But even submissions of drivel are okay, Baty says, adding that most people who participate are in it just to flex their creative muscles or to say they’ve written a novel. Others, like McClellan, use the event as practice, to tone and improve their writing. Baty estimates that only about 20 percent of participants are dead set on getting their NaNoWriMo work published.
A few people, like Rich and science fiction author James R. Strickland, go into the month with no expectations and come out with the novels that start their writing careers. Rich, a former stay-at-home mom, signed up on a whim in 2002. “I thought, I’ll give it a shot,” she says. “The worst possible scenario was that I would start writing and not finish.” But by the end of the month, Rich felt that she had a workable manuscript. She joined the Romance Writers of America and soon signed a book deal. Her first novel, Time Off for Good Behavior, went on to win the RWA’s Best First Book award.
Strickland revised or rewrote about two-thirds of his 2004 NaNoWriMo manuscript, Looking Glass. He shopped it around to different agents before selling it to a publisher he met at a science fiction convention. And Sara Gruen, author of the New York Times best-seller Water for Elephants, published her NaNoWriMo novel, Flying Changes, in 2005.
Despite Success stories like these, NaNoWriMo is not without its critics. Eric Rosenfield, a computer programmer who runs the literary blog Wet Asphalt, wrote the post, “Why I Hate National Novel Writing Month, and Why You Should Too,” claiming the event trivializes novel writing.
Rosenfield emphasizes that he has nothing against the participants and is not attacking their right to write a novel. “It’s the attitude that [the creators] take toward it,” he says. “The way that they’re presenting it indicates to me that they’re not taking the idea of writing a novel seriously.”
Baty, though, has a different perspective. He doesn’t deny that writing takes dedication and commitment, but he feels that dutiful revisions should take place later on. After the inhibitions are removed, he says, people can write what they’ve always been afraid to write and then “get the genius on the second draft.”
Over the years, NaNoWriMo has grown beyond its original purpose of simply encouraging people to write. For the past three years, organizers have donated half of their net profits (NaNoWriMo has an online store that sells products; it’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that accepts donations, and writers can be sponsored much like runners or walkers can be for charity races) to Room to Read, a group dedicated to building libraries in rural areas of Southeast Asia. And in 2005, Baty and his friends launched NaNoWriMo’s K–12 equivalent, called the Young Writers Program. Teachers and students set individual word-count goals and use the event as a way to create excitement about writing.
Despite the changes to and the growing popularity of NaNoWriMo, Baty insists that its main purpose remains simple yet powerful. “People just sometimes see for the first time that people have a story to tell, and that they have the perfect voice to tell it,” he says. “This model of monthlong creativity for everyone has an amazing potential to transform the world.”
ANGELA CHANG is a Chicago-based writer who had never considered writing a novel until she spoke with Chris Baty.
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