Interview with Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo

Chris Baty is the founder of National Novel Writing Month, which is also known as NaNoWriMo. I completed NaNoWriMo some years ago and I’m entering it again this year. If you’re on the NaNoWriMo forums, feel free to add me as a Writing Buddy! My userid is “Inkygirl.”

This year, I’m trying an experiment by dictating my whole novel using voice-activated software. This is partly so I don’t over-do typing (which I save for my regular writing) and also to see how this affects my writing process. I’m off to a slow start because I’m just getting used to some new software, but I’m gradually picking up speed.

Anyway, Chris was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

How much time does NaNoWriMo take for you to run each year? How many volunteers do you have? (or are they paid?)

A couple years ago, we created a nonprofit organization called the Office of Letters and Light to run NaNo and launch other events like it. Between NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy, OLL has three full-time, year-round paid staff people. There’s me (who runs OLL and NaNoWriMo), Tavia (who runs the Young Writers Program, oversees our online donation station and store, and puts on our annual Write-a-thon fundraising gala) and Lindsey (who is the direct contact for all our participants, oversees our volunteer chapterheads in 40 countries, and manages the office).

We also have a year-round, part-time forums moderator, a year-round, part-time systems administrator/tech person, a seasonal part-time Script Frenzy Program Director, and, in the fall, a full-time shipper whose sole job is to oversee the sending out of thousands of donor goodies, Young Writers Program Classroom Kits, Municipal Liaison packages, and NaNoWriMo t-shirts.

Additionally, NaNoWriMo typically hires about a dozen contractors to work on specific projects like computer programming, web design, and curriculum development.

On the volunteer front, we also have a great team of interns every year, an amazing board of directors, and about 600 volunteer Municipal Liaisons in cities around the world. It really does take a village!

How successful has your Young Writers Program been?

The impact it’s had on teachers and students has been really inspiring. Teachers who bring NaNoWriMo into their classrooms are usually a little stunned by how much their kids end up writing, and how the NaNoWriMo experience changes students’ relationships to books and literature. Kids come away from November feeling that they can do anything they put their minds to, and we get emails from teachers saying they’ll never teach writing the same way again. That feels good.

This year we have a brand-new website (http://ywp.nanowrimo.org), three new tracks of lesson plans, and a bunch of great new curriculum. We’re expecting 20,000 kids and teens to take part in over a dozen countries.

Do you have any plans for this year’s NaNoWriMo that are different from last year’s?

We launched a week early this year! Which I’m very proud of. And we’ve tried really hard to make the NaNoWriMo website better in lots little ways, like giving people the ability to update their word count from every page of the site, and adding a place to put a synopsis, bio, and book cover artwork. We’ve also recruited a lot of great new authors to pen pep talks for this year’s participants, including Philip Pullman, Piers Anthony, Brian Jacques, and Meg Cabot. Because we have so many pep talkers, there will be encouraging emails going out almost every other day in November.

Can NaNoWriMo help experienced writers? Or is it mainly geared toward beginning writers?

I would say NaNoWriMo is geared more towards book-lovers than it is towards experienced book-writers. But the 30-day deadline and friendly community works just as well for professional novelists as it does for amateur writers, and it’s been so great to see more and more professional novelists joining the escapade over the years. I think the pros get a contact high from the enthusiasm of the first-timers, and the first-timers get great, practical advice on first-draft survival techniques from the experienced writers. It’s a really good balance.

And more and more people who started out as first-time novelists in NaNoWriMo have also been slipping over to the professional side of the fence. As of right now, 27 NaNoWriMo manuscripts have found a home with publishers, with more reports of deals coming in every month.

Any success stories from last year’s NaNoWriMo that you’d like to share?

Last year, we were proud to see Sara Gruen’s Water For Elephants, which started its life as a NaNoWriMo novel, hit #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. It was also really exciting to see the teens of Corliss High School, who took part in our Young Writers Program and received our fleet of AlphaSmart loaner laptops, ended up continuing the project in a really amazing way with the help of a local nonprofit: http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/126

How did your book “No Plot? No Problem!” get sold? Did you pitch publishers or did Chronicle approach you?

Gayle Brandeis is a novelist who had taken part in some of the early NaNoWriMos. Gayle mentioned NaNoWriMo to her agent, Arielle Eckstut, and Arielle sent me an email through the NaNoWriMo site introducing herself and encouraging me to get in touch if I wanted to talk.

I ended up pitching her two book projects. One was a non-fiction collection of essays about being a 20something music nerd. The other was a NaNoWriMo survival guide. She was very tactful about the first idea’s dismal chances of ever finding a publisher, and was encouraging about the NaNo how-to book.

So I bought Michael Larsen’s book on nonfiction book proposals and basically just did everything he told me to. It took me about two months. Arielle sent the proposal out to about a half-dozen different editors. We went with Chronicle because I knew they’d do a great job with the way the book looked and felt, which was important to me.

After Chronicle bought the proposal, the whole process went really smoothly (and quickly!). I had about four months from contract signing to the day they needed the first draft turned in, which meant I spent the fall of 2003 running NaNoWriMo, writing a novel in a month, and writing a how-to book about writing a novel in a month. It was a little crazy. But the acquiring editor there, Leslie Jonath was fantastic, and she brought on a freelance editor named Jeff Campbell who had so many spot-on ideas for making the book better.

I think I’ve been really spoiled working with Chronicle, because I’ve heard such horror stories from other authors about non-existent publicity budgets or having to fight to get calls returned. Chronicle took out ads for the book in places like the New York Times Book Review and sent me to various cities to promote it, and they’ve been really great about keeping the book in print and in stores. They even made an adorable kit version of “No Plot? No Problem!“, which came out in 2006. Yay, Chronicle Books!

What do you during non-NaNoWriMo months? Are you a full-time writer?

Between Script Frenzy and a brand-new event we’re just in the early stages of launching, I spend most of my waking hours working for the Office of Letters and Light. As NaNoWriMo has grown, there’s been less and less of a non-NaNo part of the year. I am, however, taking a three-month sabbatical from OLL this spring to revise my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel. I’ll miss the office and team, but I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time in novel-land.

For more info about NaNoWriMo, check out the official NaNoWriMo website.

Tagged as: nanowrimo