I think that gave all the newcomers a healthy jolt of confidence. They just saw the 'National Novel Writing Month' name and the long list of writers taking part and assumed it was some sort of vetted national literary initiative. When the third NaNoWriMo rolled around, though, a handful of blogs sent thousands of new folks to the site. For the first two years, everyone who took part in National Novel Writing Month knew it was a homespun challenge run by a twentysomething book nerd with a lot of enthusiasm and almost zero fiction-writing experience. I kind of blame the name for the event's growth.

So Chris has moved on from National Novel Writing Month, and we wanted to check in with him to see what he's working on now, and what he learned from being around all those crazy writers writing all those crazy books.ĬB: Not at all! It wasn't until the third year, when I was planning for 200 participants and 5,000 people showed up, that I first realized that the idea might have some appeal beyond my friends. The most telling thing we can say about him is that our daughter loves hanging out with him. He has boundless enthusiasm, a wicked sense of humor and he listens when you talk.

We saw bears and whales and totem poles with Chris.

Then last summer, an astonishing librarian named Amy Marshall brought us to rural Alaska with the NaNo team, to make cyber-presentations to libraries in the most remote parts of Alaska. NaNoWriMo, as it's called, now has hundreds of thousands of participants all over the world, writing writing writing. We watched as he built this strange, beautiful community of lunatics and dreamers who, every November, write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. We first met Chris Baty about a decade ago, when Arielle agented his book No Plot, No Problem: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days.

Chris baty