No Plot? No Problem! (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. Copyright 2004 by Chris Baty.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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NO PLOT? NO PROBLEM!
A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days

Chris Baty

FOR MY PARENTS, who knew it was possible all along.

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November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo):
http://www.nanowrimo.org

The best way to read this book on DailyLit is to time your reading so that on November 1—the first day of NaNoWriMo—you will receive installment 32. For the second half of the book, which is designed to offer day-by-day encouragement, you should read one installment per day each day of the week. Voilá! Instant NaNoWriMo coach. Good luck!

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INTRODUCTION

The era, in retrospect, was very kind to dumb ideas.

The year was 1999, and I was working as a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, drinking way too much coffee and watching the dot-com boom rewrite the rules of life around me.

Back then, it seemed entirely feasible—nay, inevitable—that my friends and I would spend three tiring years in the workforce, throwing nerf balls at each other and staging madcap office-chair races. And then we’d cash in our hard-earned stock options, buy a small island somewhere, and helicopter off into blissful retirement.

It was a delicious, surreal moment, and in the middle of it all I decided that what I really needed to do was write a novel in a month. Not because I had a great idea for a book. On the contrary, I had no ideas for a book.

All of this made perfect sense in 1999.

In a more grounded age, my novel-in-a-month concept would have been reality-checked right out of existence. Instead, the very first National Novel Writing Month set sail two weeks later, with almost everyone I knew in the Bay Area on board.

That the twenty-one of us who signed up for the escapade were undertalented goofballs who had no business flailing around at the serious endeavor of novel writing was pretty clear. We hadn’t taken any creative writing courses in college, or read any how-to books on story or craft. And our combined post-elementary-school fiction output would have fit comfortably on a Post-it Note.

My only explanation for our cheeky ambition is this: Being surrounded by pet-supply e-tailers worth more than IBM has a way of getting your sense of what’s possible all out of whack. The old millennium was dying; a better one was on its way. We were in our mid-twenties, and we had no idea what we were doing. But we knew we loved books. And so we set out to write them.

BOOKISH HOOLIGANS

That love of books, I think, was the saving grace of the whole enterprise. However unseriously we had agreed to take the writing process, we had an absolute reverence for novels themselves, the papery bricks of goodness that, once pried apart, unleashed the most amazing visions in their owners. In books, we’d found magical portals and steadfast companions, witnessed acts of true love and gaped at absolute evil. Books, as much as our friends and parents, had been our early educators, allowing us our first exciting glimpses into life beyond the gates of childhood.

If we loved books, we were equally awestruck by their creators. Novelists were clearly a different branch of Homo sapiens; an enlightened subspecies endowed with a monstrously overdeveloped understanding of the human condition and the supernatural ability to spell words properly.

Novelists, we knew, had it made. They got fawned over in book-stores, and were forever being pestered for insights on their genius in newspapers and magazines. They had license to dress horribly, wear decades-out-of-date hairstyles, and have their shortcomings interpreted as charming quirks and idiosyncrasies rather than social dysfunctions.

Best of all, novel writing was for them a lifetime sport, one of the few branches of the entertainment industry where you are allowed to have a career long after you’ve stopped looking good in hot pants.

In short, we adored novels and glorified writers, and thought that if, after a month’s labors, we could claim even the thinnest of alliances with that world, something mysterious and transformational would happen to us. The possibility of starting the month with nada and ending it with a book we’d written—no matter how bad that book might be—was irresistible. And though we never admitted it to one another, there was also the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’d yank an undeniable work of genius from the depths of our imagination. A masterpiece-in-the-rough that would forever change the literary landscape. The Accidental American Novel. Just think of the acclaim! The feelings of satisfaction! The vastly increased dating opportunities!

The power this last point held over us, sadly, is not to be underestimated. And as a music nerd, I knew it could happen. The annals of rock and roll are filled with self-taught musicians who recorded albums first and learned how to play an instrument much later. The Sex Pistols, the Ramones, Beat Happening—they were all inspirational examples of unpolished, untrained people who went from nobodies to kings and queens of their oeuvre through sheer exuberance.

If fantasies of screaming, headbanging fans forming mosh pits at our book signings were flitting through our minds in 1999, though, we weren’t admitting it to anyone. Officially, this whole month-long novel-writing thing was to be an exercise in slapdash mediocrity. The more you wrote and the less you pretended to care, the better your standing in the field.

So at the dawn of the first National Novel Writing Month we laughed and toasted one another’s complete lack of preparation and dismal chances of success with gusto. Much like novice sailors making good on a drunken dare, we were sailing out to sea on an already-sinking ship.

And that, on July 1, 1999, was how National Novel Writing Month began: Twenty-one of us waving merrily to well-wishers gathered on shore, blowing kisses at our friends and family as we secretly cast nervous glances around the deck for life rafts.

We had no idea at the time how soon we’d end up needing them.

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