in 2004 NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty wrote a book about his experience of the first 5 years of NaNoWriMo, and and advice for writers struggling to plot their own novels! No Plot? No Problem! takes you through NaNoWriMo week by week and offers advice, exercises, and inspiration for your NaNoWriMo journey! The book was updated in 2014 to reflect the ways that NaNoWriMo had changed over those 10 years. Buy your own copy here (amazon.co.uk link, non-affiliate).
To get an idea of what the book itself is like, here is the introduction!
INTRODUCTION
The era, in retrospect, was very kind to dumb ideas.
The year was 1999, and I was working as a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, drinking way too much coffee and watching the dot-com boom rewrite the rules of life around me.
Back then, it seemed entirely feasible—nay, inevitable—that my friends and I would spend three tiring years in the workforce, throwing nerf balls at each other and staging madcap office-chair races. And then we’d cash in our hard-earned stock options, buy a small island somewhere, and helicopter off into blissful retirement.
It was a delicious, surreal moment, and in the middle of it all I decided that what I really needed to do was write a novel in a month. Not because I had a great idea for a book. On the contrary, I had no ideas for a book.
All of this made perfect sense in 1999.
In a more grounded age, my novel-in-a-month concept would have been reality-checked right out of existence. Instead, the very first National Novel Writing Month set sail two weeks later, with almost everyone I knew in the Bay Area on board.
That the twenty-one of us who signed up for the escapade were undertalented goofballs who had no business flailing around at the serious endeavor of novel writing was pretty clear. We hadn’t taken any creative writing courses in college, or read any how-to books on story or craft. And our combined postelementary-school fiction output would have fit comfortably on a Post-it Note.
My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.
BOOKISH HOOLIGANS
That love of books, I think, was the saving grace of the whole enterprise. However unseriously we had agreed to take the writing process, we had an absolute reverence for novels themselves, the papery bricks of goodness that, once pried apart, unleashed the most amazing visions in their owners. In books, we’d found magical portals and steadfast companions, witnessed acts of true love and gaped at absolute evil. Books, as much as our friends and parents, had been our early educators, allowing us our first
exciting glimpses into life beyond the gates of childhood.
If we loved books, we were equally awestruck by their creators. Novelists were clearly a different branch of Homo sapiens; an enlightened subspecies endowed with a monstrously overdeveloped understanding of the human condition and the supernatural ability to spell words properly.
Novelists, we knew, had it made. They got fawned over in book-stores, and were forever being pestered for insights on their genius in newspapers and magazines. They had license to dress horribly, wear decades-out-of-date hairstyles, and have their shortcomings interpreted as charming quirks and idiosyncrasies rather than social dysfunctions.
Best of all, novel writing was for them a lifetime sport, one of the few branches of the entertainment industry where you are allowed to have a career long after you’ve stopped looking good in hot pants.
In short, we adored novels and glorified writers, and thought that if, after a month’s labors, we could claim even the thinnest of alliances with that world, something mysterious and transformational would happen to us. The possibility of starting the month with nada and ending it with a book we’d written— no matter how bad that book might be—was irresistible. And though we never admitted it to one another, there was also the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’d yank an undeniable work of genius from
the depths of our imagination. A masterpiece-in-the-rough that would forever change the literary landscape. The Accidental American Novel. Just think of the acclaim! The feelings of satisfaction! The vastly increased dating opportunities!
The power this last point held over us, sadly, is not to be underestimated. And as a music nerd, I knew it could happen. The annals of rock and roll are filled with self-taught musicians who recorded albums first and learned how to play an instrument much later. The Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Beat Happening —they were all inspirational examples of unpolished, untrained people who went from nobodies to kings and queens of their oeuvre through sheer exuberance.
If fantasies of screaming, headbanging fans forming mosh pits at our book signings were flitting through our minds in 1999, though, we weren’t admitting it to anyone. Officially, this whole monthlong novel-writing thing was to be an exercise in slapdash mediocrity. The more you wrote and the less you pretended to care, the better your standing in the field.
So at the dawn of the first National Novel Writing Month we laughed and toasted one another’s complete lack of preparation and dismal chances of success with gusto. Much like novice sailors making good on a drunken dare, we were sailing out to sea on an already-sinking ship.
And that, on July 1, 1999, was how National Novel Writing Month began: Twenty-one of us waving merrily to well-wishers gathered on shore, blowing kisses at our friends and family as we secretly cast nervous glances around the deck for life rafts.
We had no idea at the time how soon we’d end up needing them.
A MONTH AT SEA
Writer and championship figure skater Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.” As we hurled ourselves toward our likely literary demise, we were nothing if not quick about it.
The opening week of NaNoWriMo (as we were all soon calling it) was an overcaffeinated typing frenzy. For the sake of clarity, we had all agreed to define a novel as 50,000 words of fiction. With that lofty goal in sight, quantity quickly took precedence over quality, and we met in coffeeshops after work each night to add another couple thousand words of girth to our literary creations.
As we wrote, we gave ourselves word quotas and created elaborate challenges and races. Anyone who hadn’t reached their writing goal wasn’t allowed to get drink refills or go to the bathroom until they hit the mark. It was ridiculous, screaming fun, and the levity of those early sessions infused what would have normally been a terrifying endeavor—writing a book in an absurdly short amount of time—into a raucous field trip to novel-land.
The rambunctious mood of those first few days was further buoyed by the fact that the writing campaign started off well for all of us. In short order, we had settings, main characters, and a few chapters under our belts. The hardest part was over, it seemed, and we settled into our novels with the happy assurance that our muses would ably guide us through whatever unfamiliar terrain lay ahead.
Our muses, it turned out, had other plans.
BECALMED
By the seven-day mark, the initial excitement had worn off, and it revealed a sad and ugly truth: Our novels were bad. Maybe even horrible. As Week One slipped away, the intoxicating speed of the escapade ground to a halt, and we began poking at our novels with the dismay of a third-grader whose heaping portion of dessert has been swapped for a plate of mushy vegetables.
When we broached the subject of our flagging motivations during one of our writing sessions, it became clear that most of us were having the same problem: Starting had been easy. Continuing was hard. Perhaps flinging a random assortment of characters at a Microsoft Word document, we admitted, was not the soundest approach to book-building. And maybe trying to cram something as large as novel writing into an already busy schedule doomed both life and literature.
Our lives certainly had taken on the feel of cursed things: Giving over every free moment to one’s novel meant no sleeping-in on weekends, no matinee movies, and no languorous dinners with friends.
Instead, we spent our downtime prodding at lifeless characters and wondering how long a human body could subsist on an all-ramen and Coke diet before liver functions ceased entirely.
By the middle of Week Two, we were ready to mutiny. Half of the participants dropped out. Unfortunately, some of us had bragged so widely about our heroic novel-writing quest that we were too ashamed to quit before the month ended. So we slogged on, continuing to meet for less-than-joyous writing sessions. We were no longer in it to win it; our plan at that point was just to run out the clock.
Week Two came and went. And then some strange things started happening.
The aimless, anemic characters we’d invented in the first fourteen days began to perk up and do things.
Quirky, unexpected, readable things. They sold their SUVs and started commuting to work in golf carts. They joined polka bands and got kidnapped by woodland creatures and found themselves organizing jewel-heist capers with their next-door neighbors from the nursing home.
It was as if our main characters, tired of waiting for competent stage direction from us, simply took control of the show. Thankfully, they turned out to be far better storytellers than we ever were.
The listlessness of Week Two lifted, and the flat lines of our novels began to resemble the trajectories of honest-to-God story arcs. We were still tired, sure. But our books had gone from being albatrosses around our necks to welcoming ports in the storm of everyday life. Rather than dreading the nightly drudgery of writing, we began fantasizing about what directions the story would take in the course of the evening’s work. We called our answering machines to dictate plot breakthroughs we’d hatched on our morning commutes, and scribbled out ever-lengthening backstories on napkins, receipts, coworkers; anything we could get our hands on to capture some of the ideas that were pouring out of our overtaxed brains.
To be fair, the novels emerging on our hard drives were far from the works of genius we’d secretly hoped for. They were stiff and awkward creatures, riddled with enormous plot holes, their loose ends flopping lewdly. But they were beautiful in their own ungainly way. And absolutely breathtaking in their potential.
IF YOU BUILD IT, KEVIN COSTNER WILL COME
Needless to say, at this point we were freaked out of our minds. It felt like we’d stumbled through a portal into a giddy netherworld, a Narnia for grown-ups where hours passed like seconds and the most outrageous and wonderful things you imagined became real.
It was one of the best, most fulfilling experiences of my life, and, sadly, the only thing I can compare it to is the movie Field of Dreams—where Kevin Costner, playing an Iowa farmer, begins hearing voices that tell him: “If you build it, they will come.”
At the advice of the creepy voices, Kevin distances himself from his nay-saying wife and does what any self-respecting man would do: He wrecks his cornfield and builds a professional-grade baseball diamond next to his farmhouse. He’s clearly berserk. Possessed. Crazy as a loon.
Those of us heading towards the fourth week of NaNoWriMo could relate. In the movie, Costner’s wacko labors are rewarded with the appearance of ghostly baseball greats from bygone eras, who play exhibition games and inspire epiphanies in James Earl Jones. For us, the rewards were similarly bountiful. After two weeks of tilling the meager, gravelly soil of our imaginations, the stories we’d been doggedly tending bloomed riotously. In Week Three, we harvested bumper crops of plot twists and fascinating characters, all of them eager to have their star turns on the sets we’d created.
Though undeniably lousy baseball players, they were good at other things. My characters, for example, were good at sleeping with people they weren’t supposed to. Another person’s characters were good at taking road trips. And someone else’s were good at inventing fonts that, when viewed, made people’s brains explode.
To each their own. Whatever varied directions our stories were moving in, they were definitely moving.
And they were dragging us, happy and wide-eyed, in their wake.
On Day 29, the first participant crossed the 50,000-word finish line. Another followed. Then another.
July came to a close, and as exhilarating as it had been to spend thirty-one days exploring the outer reaches of our imaginations, we were all ready to return to real life. So we wrapped up our stories, put our characters to bed, and turned out the lights one by one in the worlds we’d created.
Of the twenty-one people who participated, only six of us made it across the 50,000-word finish line that first year, with the rest falling short by anywhere from 500 to 49,000 words. Everyone who participated in the escapade, though, came away from the experience changed by it.
Some participants, to be honest, realized that they never wanted to write another book again. Others were ready to apply the next day to MFA programs in creative writing. For me, the revelation I couldn’t shake was this: The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent.
It’s the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen. (emphasis mine -Ed.)
Thanks to the go-go-go structure of the event, the stultifying pressure to write brilliant, eternal prose had been lifted. And in its place was the pleasure of learning by doing. Of taking risks, of making messes. Of following ideas just to see where they lead.
Writing for quantity rather than quality, I discovered, had the strange effect of bringing about both. It didn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense to me, especially as a writer who had spent days laboring over seventy-five-word record reviews for the local paper. But the proof was incontrovertible, and everyone who finished NaNoWriMo that first year agreed: We were only able to write so well—and have such a merry time doing it—because we wrote so quickly and intensely. The roar of adrenaline drowned out the self-critical voices that tend to make creative play such work for adults.
LESSONS LEARNED
I’ve organized National Novel Writing Month every year since 1999. I now have three books in various states of editorial redemption, along with two hopelessly execrable rough drafts whose highest calling in life will forever be propping up a listing leg of my couch. Through the good books and bad, I’ve learned a lot about getting first drafts written, and picked up countless strategies, tips, and housemateannoying behaviors that help get that initial, breathless sketch of a novel down on paper.
I think the lasting lessons from that first year, though, boil down to just four revelations.
1) Enlightenment Is Overrated
Before being swept up in the momentum of National Novel Writing Month, my general approach to fiction writing was to stall as long as possible. In fact, I had high hopes of delaying any novel writing attempts until I was older and wiser, and had achieved a state of complete literary enlightenment.
From this position of all-seeing wisdom, I knew I would have amassed a roster of brilliant, original plots and dynamic, compelling characters. And then I could cherry-pick the best ones for my masterful creation.
If all went according to plan, I figured the state of enlightenment would descend on my bald head sometime around my ninetieth birthday. And then, fully primed, I could simply dictate the Nobel Prizeworthy manuscript to my assistant or nursemaid, who would then pass it on to an appropriate publisher.
Having written a not-irredeemable novel as a twenty-six-year-old made me realize that “sooner” definitely trumps “later” when it comes to writing. Every period in one’s life, I saw, bustles with novelworthy passions, dilemmas, and energies specific to that age. The novel I wrote at twenty-six is much different than the one I wrote at thirty, which will (hopefully) be much different than the one I write at fifty. What better reason to get writing now? With each passing era, a new novel is possible. And a potentially great book you could have written slips away into noveling oblivion.
2) Being Busy Is Good For Your Writing
You’ve probably heard the old adage that if you want to get something done, you should ask a busy person to do it. I’ve discovered this is acutely true when it comes to novel writing.
Because here’s the thing: However attractive the idea of a writer’s retreat may sound, having all day to poke around on a novel actually hampers productivity. This is something I suspected after the first year of NaNoWriMo, and something I confirmed after the second—when, emboldened by a pair of questionable successes in the month-long noveling field, I decided that the only thing separating me from Oprah’s Book Club was three months of uninterrupted writing time with my laptop.
And so I spent the following half year saving up enough money to resign my various obligations for three months, and then dove into the deliriously productive life of a full-time novelist.
Things went awry almost immediately. With nothing to do all day but write, I found myself doing everything but writing. Essential errands were run. Laundry was done. The bathroom was cleaned. Less essential errands were run. The bathroom was re-cleaned. A complex rooftop Habitrail system designed to make tree-to-tree transitioning easier for the neighborhood squirrels was built and nearly installed before the county’s animal services unit intervened. And so on.
The mounting guilt I felt each evening over accomplishing so little writing during the day would then force me to cancel the plans I had made with friends that night. So I could stay in and get some writing done.
Night, of course, simply involved more work on the Habitrail.
At the end of the three months, I was frustrated, my friends were worried, and the squirrels continued to make their clumsy, desperate leaps from branch to branch. The experiment in nonstop writing was a total disaster.
For me the moral of the story is this: A rough draft is best written in the steam-cooker of an already busy life. If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal.
When, on the other hand, you have nothing to do, getting out of bed and washing yourself before 2:00 P.M. feels like too much work to even contemplate.
As Isaac Newton observed, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. When writing your first draft, being busy is key. It may feel frustrating at first, but having daily writing periods curtailed by chores, family, and other distractions actually helps you get the thing done. This is partly because the hectic
pace forces you type with a fleet-fingered desperation. But it’s mostly because noveling in the midst of a chaotic life makes “book time” a treat rather than an obligation. It’s a small psychological shift, but it makes all the difference in the world.
3) Plot Happens
From that first NaNoWriMo, I learned that you are allowed to begin a novel simply by turning on the nearest computer and typing. You don’t need to do research; you don’t need to understand anything about your characters or plan out your setting. It’s fine to just start. And making it up as you go along
does not require you to be a Particularly gifted novelist. That first year, I started with neither plot nor characters, and I ended up with a reasonably accomplished novel that had tension and momentum and even a subplot or two. And I did all that with an imagination the size of a pea.
If you spend enough time with your characters, plot simply happens. This makes novel writing, in essence, a literary trapeze act, one where you have to blindly trust that your imagination and intuition will be there to catch you and fling you onward at each stage of your high-flying journey.
The good news is that our imaginations live for these high-pressure situations. The human brain is an agile, sure-handed partner, an attention-loving, razzle-dazzle showthing that can pull plausible transitions out of thin air and catch us before anything (save our pride) gets too terribly injured on our
inevitable tumbles.
The key to writing a novel is to realize that you are in the greatest hands possible: your own. Ray Bradbury said it best: “Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.”
4) Writing For Its Own Sake Has Surprising Rewards
That first year I learned that writing a novel simply feels great. Slipping into “the zone”—that place where you become a passive conduit to a story—exercises your brain in weird, pleasant ways and just makes life a little bit more enchanted. No matter what your talent level, novel writing is a low-stress,
high-rewards hobby.
After I’d written my own manuscript, I also found myself able to appreciate my favorite books on a different level. I stopped taking the text for granted and began noticing a host of crafty details and wellconcealed seams. To really get behind the scenes and understand the books you love as beautiful art
and crafted artifice, it helps to write one yourself. Creating my own manuscript also opened my mind to the joys of genres I’d never read before, as I become curious about the way different kinds of books are constructed.
And finally, the more I wrote, the better my writing became. I now see each of the month-long novels I’ve written as a thirty-day scholarship to the most exclusive, important writing academy in the world.
If there’s one thing successful novelists agree on, it’s this: The single best thing you can do to improve your writing is to write. Copiously.
The more books you have under your belt, the more comfortable you are with your writing voice, and the more confident you are in your style. Treating a novel like a hands-on writing class-room—where advancement relies as much on dramatic failures as it does on heroic successes—has been an
amazingly liberating experience for me. And it’s taught me exactly which aspects of noveling I’m good at (coffee drinking and complaining) and what my weaknesses are (dialogue, character development, plot, etc.).
It’s invaluable feedback, and I couldn’t have gotten it any other way.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT NANOWRIMO HEADQUARTERS
And what happened to NaNoWriMo after that first year? In 2000, I moved National Novel Writing Month from July to November to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather. That second year, an amazing 140 people signed up, and 29 people ended up winning.
Then word began to spread about NaNoWriMo. The Los Angeles Times did an article, as did USA Today. A talented engineer built the new, more-robust www.NaNoWriMo.org site for the event, one with discussion boards, novel-excerpt posting areas, personalized word-count progress bars, and a
winner verification system.
The event grew larger still—five thousand participants the third year—and I continued to work as both director and participant, sending out pep-talk emails, overseeing the Web site, and interacting with nascent NaNoWriMo chapters around the world.
In November 2003, NaNoWriMo celebrated its fifth anniversary with more than twenty-five thousand participants from over thirty countries. By my calculations, NaNoWriMo is now responsible for more fiction each year than all of America’s creative writing programs combined.
A handful of participants have gone on to edit and sell their creations to big-time publishing houses like Pinnacle and Warner Books. The biggest success stories of National Novel Writing Month, though, are rarely the published ones. These are the stories of everyday people who, over the course of one frantic
month, discover that literature is not merely a spectator sport. Who discover that fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.
YOUR MISSION
No Plot? No Problem! is intended as a guidebook and companion for that month-long vacation into the weird, wonderful realm of the imagination. In its nine chapters, I’ve tried to stuff five years of novelwriting tips, tricks, strategies, and schemes, as well as do’s, don’ts, and encouraging anecdotes from dozens of NaNoWriMo veterans. Chapters one through three describe how to prepare for the actual writing month. They guide you in creating a realistic schedule and in gathering the tools and treats that are essential in bashing your book out. They also look at ways to turn your home and immediate surroundings into phenomenally productive word factories, and lay out winning tactics to transform innocent bystanders into cheerleaders and fellow travelers on the journey.
Chapter four introduces such novelish concepts as plot, setting, and character, and helps you uncover what it is you’d actually like to write about during your upcoming writing marathon.
Chapters five through eight serve as a week-by-week guide to your writing adventure. They lay out the issues and dilemmas particular to each week, and offer plenty of exercises for sparking your creativity and goofy ways to bag the day’s word-count quota while maintaining inspired and generally coherent storytelling.
Chapter nine offers some thoughts and advice on post-novel life, particularly on making a graceful transition back into the day-to-day world, and it also contains a guide to rewriting one-month novels for those interested in shaping and polishing their work into publish-worthy form.
No Plot? No Problem! makes a perfect companion for those looking to undertake the madcap National Novel Writing Month in November. But because November is an already-overloaded month for many people (students, I’m looking at you), No Plot? No Problem! was also created as a year-round personal
trainer for anyone interested in embarking on their own month-long noveling journey.
Whether you plan on writing your novel in winter or summer, next week or next year, I hope you’ll find in these pages the friendly kick in the pants needed to help you take your book from embryonic idea to completed draft in one action-packed month.
With great caffeinated well-wishes,
Chris Baty