Now that we’ve moved the creativity interviews over to about-creativity.com, my plan is to post brief excerpts here, both to share favorite bits, and to let folks know when new interviews go live.
The most recent interview was with Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, an extraordinary site, community, and annual event that exhorts people to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of November.
Baty’s been doing this for years now, and I wanted to find out what he’s learned from getting hundreds of thousands of people to tackle a creative project of that scale Here’s a bit of his answer:
“Part of National Novel Writing Month’s success, the reason so
many people keep doing it, is that it’s an event. I didn’t study English in college. I always loved books. I loved writing. But I’m an anthropology major, and I didn’t come at this from the position of an aspiring novelist who really was frustrated by the realities in the publishing market so I made my own world. It was really just like, “Man, books are so cool, and wouldn’t it be cool to write a book?” And because of that, there isn’t this unnecessary stultifying reverence for the literary art form.
I see novels as an enormous, exciting puzzle or something similar to the local middle school basketball court where you can go up on Saturday with your friends and have a great day losing yourself in this game and the thrill of competition. Novel writing is the best video game on the planet, one that requires so many different aspects of your imagination and so many different aspects of your life management skills. It really takes a lot of focus and discipline. The creative side of it is just one component.”