NaNoWriMo Blog - No Plot! No Problem!

NaNoWriMo True-Life Tale: Dylan Staley

Lindsey Grant — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:03:41 -0700

"By the end of our conversation, I now had one person that would put sleep and sanity aside for one month to embark on this amazing journey..."

"NaNoWriMo is fun, but it is barrels of fun when you write with a group. Intent on both finishing a 50,000 word novel and dragging a friend or two across the finish line, I began recruiting people a few days before November 1st. Rewarded with mostly blank stares, the finish line seemed farther and farther. But, keeping my head held high, I continued relentlessly towards my goal of beginning and finishing NaNo with friends by my side, because what's the purpose of finishing without someone to share it with?

Well, it was the week before NaNo, and I was knee deep in outlining. Every chance I got, I pulled out my notebook and scribbled like a mad man. And when anyone came near, I asked their opinion on whether or not I should incorporate a vicious man/llama to get the main character to go into the abyss of doom. It was then I met Amanda. Quiet, kind of to herself, I felt she would be the perfect person to ask if my main character should have a wooden leg. Thank goodness I did, too. By the end of our conversation, I now had one person that would put sleep and sanity aside for one month to embark on this amazing journey we now had before us. Before long, one person became two, which then became four, and then we had a nice sized group that made the vow to attempt the journey. Cheers abound, we set off on our journey bright and early that November 1st.

We met frequently during school, meeting up in our small alcove in the school's library. Eventually, we managed to get the librarians to reserve the spot just for us! So, even when the library was full of loud, obnoxious teenagers, we had our tiny get-away between the last row of non-fiction and the first and only shelve of biographies. We had a table with four chairs and two comfy chairs next to the window that opened up into the school courtyard. Many a word was written in that alcove, and many a fun time was had. There was even an incident with a leg appearing inside a window across the yard. Not an entire body, but just a leg.

November marched on, and as did we. We were nearing our goal, and we were helping (read: dragging) each other along the way. One day, I was walking to class a tad bit late due to the fact my main characters wife needed to die, and I couldn't decide whether it should be a simple fall down the stairs due to a drunken stupor, or a slow painful death due to a super-virus that was slowly making it's way across the globe. While walking to my class, a teacher stopped me and asked if I was the one that was organizing the novel writing group. I replied with a modest, yet hurried, yes. She then took my hand and shook it. With a bewildered look, I just stared back. She then said 'I just wanted to shake your hand. You've made people who felt like they didn't belong anywhere in their life feel like they finally belong somewhere.'

Needless to say, I was late for class."

--Dylan Staley

Dylan is a 15 (16 on July 18th!) year old high school student from the capital city of Louisiana. This past year was his first year participating in NaNoWriMo, and it will NOT be his last. Also, Dylan's favorite genres are fantasy and realistic fiction, and his favorite farm animal is a chicken.

Wanna share your story? Send it in!

Introducing NaNoWriMo True-Life Tales

Chris Baty — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:47:29 -0700

Hey everyone!

So two weeks ago, I sent an email to the NaNoWriMo mailing list that contained the following bit:

YOUR SUMMER WRITING ASSIGNMENT: A NANOWRIMO STORY
Every year, we hear hundreds of touching, hilarious stories from participants about the unexpected impacts that NaNoWriMo has had on their lives. Last week, I talked to Jenn, a NaNoWriMo 2002 winner. Jenn has an agent interested in her novel (yay!), but she's fallen into the abyss of perfectionism and prolonged rewrites, with no end in sight (booo).

Last month, Jenn's mother took matters into her own hands by offering to help Jenn with the down payment on her first home. Jenn and her husband have been wanting to buy a house for years, so this was a really big deal. The offer, however, came with a catch. Jenn's mom isn't mailing the check until Jenn finishes her novel.

That's NaNoWriMo in a nutshell: Helping families withhold generous gifts from one another since 1999. Whenever I hear a story like Jenn's, I always wish that we had some easy way to share it with the community at large. Which is why I was so excited when NaNoWriMo volunteer Drew Patty made a suggestion: Why not invite participants to send in stories of the surprising effects NaNoWriMo has had on their lives, and then run those tales on the NaNo blog all summer?

Drew Patty, I think, is going to be president some day.

So here's our shout-out: If NaNoWriMo helped you find true love or wrecked your life or opened some doors you hadn't thought would open, and you're willing to have us share that story with the world, please send it in! Stories should be 100-1000 words. Know that we will be sharing these stories far and wide, so please don't include anything you wouldn't want your mom to know about.

We've even created a magical Stories Submission area just for your tale. Don't be shy! Write it up and send it in!

Almost immediately, great stories started arriving in my inbox. We've been reading through all of them these past few weeks, laughing, crying, and eating a lot of these strange, fleshy sour-watermelon candies that Cybele brought up from LA on Thursday.

Sorry. That last bit didn't have much to do with anything. But these are very odd candies.

Anyway, we've given our fantastic new employee, Lindsey, the task of posting one True-Life Tale every weekday for the next few months. We hope you love reading them as much as we loved getting them. And it's not too late to send your story in! We'll keep running them sporadically through the fall.

And I have an update on Jenn, the Wrimo who needed to finish her novel before she could buy a home. Jenn caught her third noveling wind over the 4th of July weekend, and has been making huge strides on the rewrite ever since. Things are looking good for her having it done by November.

And that, my friends, is a tale with a truly happy ending.

Off to eat a few more of those pink candies,

Chris

Pep wanted

Chris Baty — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 16:19:20 -0800

Okay! So. Pep talks. We want to invite a bunch of great, kind-hearted authors to write them for us again this November. The feedback we got back last year was that you really liked the ones from authors who addressed the NaNoWriMo experience or the first-draft-wrangling process.

Just for fun, here's the list of people we invited last year (please excuse the misspellings---this is from our brainstorming doc):

A.M. Homes
Alice Walker
Anne Lamott
Anne Rice
Arundhati Roy
Carl Hiaasen
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chinua Achebe
Christopher Paolini
Daniel Handler
David Eggers
Deanna Rayburn
E.L. Konigsburg
Edwidge Danticat
Garth Nix
Gary Soto
Haruki Murakami
Heidi Julavits
Ian McEwan
Isabel Allende
J.K. Rowling
Jane Smiley
Jerry Spinelli
John Grisham
John Irving
John Updike
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Franzen
Joyce Carol Oates
Julianna Baggott
July Blume
Katherine Paterson
Louis Sachar
Mary Gaitskill
Naomi Novik
Neil Gaiman
Nick Hornby
Nora Roberts
Patricia Maclachlan
Philip Pullman
Philip Roth
Sandra Cisneros
Sara Gruen
Stephen King
Sue Grafton
T.C. Boyle
Toni Morrison
Ursula Le Guin
Uzodinma Iweala

Some of these folks sent us the nicest notes in response explaining that they didn't have time to do it. We'll give them a try again this spring, hoping they'll be less busy. Thanks to your feedback to last year's post on this same topic, we'll also be sending out invitations to…

Jonathan Lethem
Janet Evanovitch
Jasper Fforde
Margaret Atwood
Meg Cabot
Piers Anthony
Orson Scott Card
God

Who else would you like us to bug for a pep talk?

Chris

ps: I'll be back writing weekly pep talks in 2008 (in addition to those of our guests). Thanks to everyone who said they missed them! I missed writing them too, and look forward to yelling at you in the fall.

Michel Gondry: Script Frenzy participant?

Chris Baty — Mon, 3 Mar 2008 14:41:43 -0800

So today, I was eating my triple-decker club sandwich (Monday is deluxe sandwich day to help offset the Mondayness of Mondays) and was reading the Onion interview with filmmaker Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, the Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc.).

Be Kind Rewind is his latest, and you can get the gist of the movie through the trailer (in fact, having seen Be Kind Rewind, I would say that once you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much seen the entire film). Anyway, I like Michel Gondry, and he said something in the interview about the film that really resonated with me…

"It sort of fuses this idea I've had for years, believing that people could create their own entertainment and they would enjoy it better, because they are in it. …[I]t's like watching a home movie. You don't watch it for the technique, you watch because it's reminiscing on good moments you spent with your friends. It reflects you. It belongs to you. So I was thinking people could, instead of spending their money to go and see a blockbuster, make their own movies."

I think my NaNoWriMo novels and Script Frenzy screenplay definitely evoke that spirit. They're so much more than just atrocious pieces of creative writing because they're my pieces of atrocious creative writing. Each one reminds me of my life at that point; the people I was writing with, the music I was listening to, and the things I thought were important and interesting.

I love the idea of a world where people get together and make their own movies, just for fun. Which is a great segue into the fact that we relaunched the Script Frenzy site this weekend. It involved a lot of late nights on the part of our tiny crew, but it looks great, and even has a few new features.

We've moved the event up two months to April, and expanded it to include novel adaptations, comic book and graphic novel scripts, and TV shows. Are you in?

Chris

Quote of the Day

Cybele May — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:33:15 -0800

I saw this quote at the bottom of one of those corporate newsletters that I get via email and thought of my dear NaNoPals.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

by Burt Bacharach

Oh, man that it so true. I can't imagine a better way to expand your vocabulary than the search for substitute words that are easier to spell!

Shiny stars

Chris Baty — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:02:29 -0800

One of the ways we increase the likelihood of having a complete mental collapse in November is by writing novels alongside everyone else. This year, we hung one of the sweet new Young Writers Program charts in the office and logged everyone's progress with the help of some inspiring shiny stars.

At the Office of Letters and Light, we run on shiny stars.

The results: six winners (including board member and bazillion-time winner Kara Platoni) and only one mental collapse.

I like those odds!

Chris

Gather at ye coffee houses while ye may

Cybele May — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 10:22:37 -0800

It's the last great weekend of November which means spectacular word count feats are being attempted by those who are sadly behind.

I admit to being one of those people at this very moment and feel comfortable divulging that Chris Baty is also a bit behind.

Yesterday Chris and I went to a favorite coffee house of mine in Hollywood, Sabor y Cultura and had 30 minute word wars until we both got 5,000 words into our novels. (And then another thousand for good measure.)

The reward for good noveling is to meet up with other novelists. This morning we got up bright and early to check out a fun coffee house in Studio City called Lulu's Beehive. At ten after nine AM it was wall-to-wall with novelists. Every surface covered with laptops and notebooks. (Well, there's one table with two guys talking lawyer stuff and contracts.)

There are so many distractions to novel-writing somehow going someplace distracting makes concentration that much easier.

Get out of the house this weekend and catch up with your novel. Think of it as a romantic date with your imagination. With coffee.

A little video from the Write-A-Thon

Cybele May — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:36:30 -0800

Back at NaNoHeadQuarters on Sunday we tried to figure out how many words were written at the Write-a-Thon on Saturday night. While we had everyone sign in with their word count, somehow we were so hopped up on sugar, vegetarian lasagna and the idea of sitting in a room with 120 other novelists toiling away that we totally forgot to have people give us their ending word counts.

However, we did an informal poll of the Municipal Liaisons in attendance and extrapolated an average from that an estimate that over 200,980 words were logged from The Womens Building Ballroom.

No matter how many words that made it into ~~nascient~~ nascent novels, or how many novelists were there, it was an awesome night because our proximity to each other made us feel connected to everyone else in NaNoLand.

Why we do this ...

Cybele May — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 20:04:53 -0800

Welcome to the Night of Writing Dangerously

Cybele May — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:39:43 -0800

It's a little after 6 PM and the writers are still filing into the ballroom of the Women's Building in San Francisco.

They sit poised to make history (or NaNoHisToRy anyway) ... the largest number of words written per square inch in 6 hours.

While we know that not everyone could be with us, we're so grateful to everyone who has supported NaNoWriMo with donations and of course their wonderful supportive spirits that have spurred fellow novelists past the 25K mark already.

Please enjoy this set of photos (we'll post as the evening progresses ... so long as the wifi holds out).