Chris Baty: From fun idea to worldwide community

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We were fans of Chris Baty, leader of impossible quests and the founder of National Novel Writing Month, long before we ever thought of building a global media empire to change the world. Little did we know that admiration would lead to our own big idea! So, after you read our interview with Chris, we invite you to explore our site. Check out the ways we're building community too, and helping readers get in touch with their own desires to heal the world.

Chris talked to us this summer about how* he went from "Hey, let's get some friends together and each write a novel this November" to leading an online, global community tens of thousands strong with a powerful shared intention. And it raises money for Room to Read, an organization that builds libraries for kids who would otherwise be without one. A global community that changes the world? We enthusiastically approve.

HK: I bet that if someone had said to you eight years ago, “Chris, you should start a global network of writers who communicate frequently and raise money for charity,” you would have thought that was impossible. Now, you inspire people to accomplish the impossible all the time. How do you get from impossible to possible?

CB: I think the first step is just telling people that they’re going to do it and giving them a timeline. The deadline is the thing. I think that’s true of whatever you want to do, whether you want to change careers, or start making art, or become an investment banker.

If you tell yourself, “Sometime before I die, I want to start playing the cello,” what you’re doing is giving yourself 30 years to sort of backburner that thing. When you say, “In the next three months, I will look into renting a cello and finding a teacher,” that’s more doable. Actually, you should probably give yourself a week to do that. Three months is way too long.

When you try to add a new scary thing to your life without some sort of external structure, it tends to inevitably fall back on some sort of to-do list. When you start sharing that timeline with others, that’s when the magic starts happening.

I feel like, if you are on a quest, the universe embraces you. The universe loves people on absolutely crazy missions that may not make sense to other people. When you start stating your hopes and your goals, however odd they may be, you start getting people saying, “Oh my God, my aunt’s cousin’s husband does that!” Doors start to open.

Coming up with a timeline, and starting to share what you’re after with as many people as you can – that’s how change happens.

HK: What made you realize that you could use the community you had built to change the world – by raising money for Room to Read? And how did you pick that cause?

CB: This was four years ago, and National Novel Writing Month had grown to the point where we had enough people on board that it was getting this really great amount of creative energy. I thought, we have this big group of people – what can we do on a global level if we just tapped into the same energy and looked toward something larger than novel writing?

I looked into national literacy organizations and found Room to Read. I had a meeting with them and loved what they were doing – you know, let’s build libraries and fill them with books and colorful maps and games and child-size furniture!

How it works is the community donates the space, Room to Read comes in, and for $2,000 or $3,000, they can provide 600 to 800 books in the local languages. And they do two years of staff training and checking in.

For me, growing up, a book was such a fantastical place to be. The sound of that spine cracking, the pictures, the words – I just imagined what it would be like, to grow up in a place where you didn’t have easy access.

So that’s what we decided to do. I set the goal of giving 50 percent of our net proceeds to Room to Read. We paid all of our expenses, and we split any money that came after that with them.

The first year, we were able to build three libraries. This past year, we built seven in Vietnam, and that was not really even breaking a sweat. It was really kind of effortless!

That was a lesson that, all it takes is just a tiny – if you can get a large group of people, if everyone can chip in $3, that does an absolute world of good.

HK: Do you think you would have been able to launch National Novel Writing Month if you’d had a larger goal in mind – building a global community with a shared intention – from the start?

CB: If somebody had set that challenge, or even if a corporation had set that challenge – I want to create a really engaged community of writers – I don’t think anybody would have said, “You should have a contest where you have no judges or prizes.”

Plus, I think the common thinking about novel writing is, first you read a lot of novels, and then you do a lot of short exercises, write a page about your childhood. Then maybe you move on to short fiction. And then you do an outline.

Thankfully, that first year, none of us had ever tried to write a novel before. We had no idea that this was supposed to be a journey of small steps. Just being complete idiots about it made possible this thing that otherwise might have been impossible. It was just based on this sense of joy in discovering stories, and discovering these characters that we all have in our brains. That discovery was so energizing, and so exciting and inspiring.

It felt like that moment in “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” where they discover that the back of the wardrobe actually leads to this other world. I had assumed that between the world of the novelist, and my world, and the world of my friends, there was this cement wall. But I just realized that with a slight shove and a lot of coffee, that wall just disappears.

If I had gone to an MFA program for creative writing and learned 90,000 rules for structuring writing, I think I would have come away from that with the idea that this wasn’t for everybody. But in fact, this is total nonsense. Novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels.

HK: NaNoWriMo grew really fast, almost at an out-of-control pace. At one point, you were running a NaNo T-shirt distribution center out of your living room and scrambling to register thousands of participants by hand. Did you ever think, my God, this is impossible?

CB: I think I probably had like, five moments of impossibility. The first one was the year we jumped from 140 to 5,000 people, and nothing was automated on the site. Thankfully, the same group of friends that had helped bring National Novel Writing Month into existence were still there to help with the primitive computer network we’d established. Still, I just thought, “My God, how are we going to get through this?”

But the lesson there is the lesson I’ve learned in every impossible moment: There’s kind of this weird, Kevin Costner-esque, “If you build it, they will come.” And they will come with supreme amounts of good will and helpfulness. Inevitably, somebody, or somebodies, always stepped up and made it happen.

The other one we had in our fifth year. I had just found this great tech guy who had helped bring the site into the modern age, but he was working at Amazon, and he was not allowed to have an outside job at all.

Right around Oct. 28, the site basically disappeared. There was just something wrong with it, and he just didn’t really have time to work on it.

I would get up in the morning feeling like I was about to die. I would turn on the computer, and I would pause for a second, praying, and then hit Enter. It would come up for a second – and then just a white screen. It was like the white screen of death.

We were getting all these e-mails from people saying, “Is the event over?” I just remember walking around my neighborhood in a total daze, with my heart rate at a million beats per second. You spend three months getting ready for this thing, and then there’s some line of code somewhere that won’t get resolved. It felt almost like I was having a wedding and I had invited 14,000 of my closest relatives, and when they got there, the church doors were locked.

We got concerned e-mails, upset e-mails. At that point, people really feel like it’s part of their lives. It’s like a cross between summer camp and Christmas or something. I think it almost felt like somebody had killed Santa Claus, and that’s exactly what I felt, too. That was very, very stressful. Anyway, it got fixed, and then the next year, it got better.

In essence, the entire endeavor of NaNoWriMo is an impossible endeavor. You basically tell tens of thousands of total strangers that they have a book in them, and they’re going to write that book, and they’re going to write it in a month. And that act of writing it in a month is going to produce a better manuscript than they would have written in five years.

HK: Once you had so many people signed up, you needed their help – their money, really – to keep things running. But the first time you asked for donations, you found that all the people you had so warmly welcomed into NaNoWriMo were ignoring your request. You were so shocked – then you heard a public radio drive and realized you’d never contributed to that, something you use every day.

CB: What a great and bitter moment! I basically had the sense that this thing – public radio – will be here no matter what, and that other people will take care of it for me. Other people make more money than I do, and they can pay for it.

National Novel Writing Month was an eye-opening experience. People put these kind of nuts ideas out there, like, “We’re going to put 24 hours of interesting radio programming out there, and we’re not going to charge you for it.” So many of these great ideas make absolutely no sense. But it’s become one of the most important sources of entertainment and news and insights for millions of people. I have not gone a day without listening to some amount of public radio.

I think as you get older, you start realizing that these great and crazy experiments are really fueled by people who use them, and it will end if you do not get involved, or it will become emaciated, or there will be something missing from it.

Now there are four nonprofits I support every year: KQED, Media Alliance, New York Writers Coalition, and 826 Valencia. It isn’t a lot of money, but it doesn’t need to be. It has a tremendous impact on making the world a hospitable place for absurd and wonderful ideas.

* Read the highly entertaining and inspiring history of National Novel Writing Month.

Comments

[Marian]

Thank you, Liz & Chris, for your own "absurd and wonderful idea" and all the creative energy and good will that people like you add to the world. I had a lot of fun reading this interview and came away feeling motivated and positive.