No Plot? No Problem!
Chris Baty
Chronicle Books
Nonfiction, Writing
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Description
As long as you can remember, you've wanted to write a novel - a mystery, a space opera, a fantasy, or maybe even a silly slice-of-life tale. You may have picked at
a few outlines and drawn up some background files, or even started a chapter or two, but it never seems to go anywhere. Writing a novel takes time you just can't
spare and talent you just don't have... or does it?
Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writer's Month (better known as NaNoWriMo), is here to tell you that everything you think you know about writing is wrong. Don't
know where the story is going? Only have one vague idea for a character? Do you even have anything more than a rough idea for an opening scene? No problem; the more
you write, the more things start to happen. The most important thing, especially for the first draft, is just to sit down, shut up, and write it... in thirty days or
less. Think it can't be done? Think again. Every November, countless people from around the world, be they in their teens or past retirement, take the NaNoWriMo pledge
and produce their own 50,000-word novel. Some of them even go on to clean up, edit, and publish what they write! So stop procrastinating, stop overthinking it, and
clear some space on your calendar. Using the pointers in this book, you too will write a novel in one month flat.
Review
Unlike most of writing books I've read, Baty's approach isn't about producing a marketable story. He advocates writing first and asking questions later, or just jumping into it with both feet and learning to swim on the way across the river. Whether or not you choose to take on the challenge of editing and submitting it isn't what the NaNoWriMo's about (though, of course, the website has help for those who want to try it, and there's even a NaNoEdMo challenge dedicated to help in the editing effort.) Granted, my writing books all state that just plain writing is the key to doing it well (much like filling sketchbooks, even with scribbles, is the only way to get better at drawing), but none of them crystallize the idea in Baty's no-nonsense approach. He even states something I have actually found out myself, to some degree: too much background work before you get a draft done actually stifles the creative flame. Overplanning can even smother that flame entirely, as you have so much invested in the story that you become afraid to make mistakes, forgetting that a first draft's job is largely to make mistakes and get them out of the way. As an unofficial semi-participant in the 2008 NaNoWriMo (aiming for 30,000 words instead of the official 50,000, just to see if I could do it), I can say with certainty that Baty's just-write-something method can and does produce measurable results - in my case, a 30,000+-page, exceptionally rough draft that nevertheless had characters, a plot, and a beginning, middle, and end. I haven't attempted to edit it into a format fit for public viewing, but another part of Baty's philosophy is that writing shouldn't be just about seeing your name on the bestseller list. You should be writing because you want to write, because you need to write, and because if you didn't write you'd spend the rest of your life regretting the stories you never even tried to tell. Getting into the specifics, I can't say I care for each and every paragraph in this book. Some of his suggestions ran counter to my own instincts and even his own advice (such as his advice to keep the story under wraps to prevent stifling amounts of support from well-meaning outsiders, countered a few chapters later by his advice to call in outsiders to brainstorm new ideas if the creative steam runs out before the deadline.) While I'm nitpicking, I might as well mention that his side notes - written in a worn typewriter font on a dark gray background - were hard to read. On the whole, I found myself agreeing with the majority of it. If you - like me - need an extra push to get moving on your writing dreams, this may be the book to do it.