The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Why Deadlines Are Every Writer’s Secret Weapon

Happy Camp NaNoWriMo Launch Day! Camp is fresh out of the oven, with new features to spice things up. And to help you get ready for your July writing project, we’re excerpting No Plot? No Problem!, written by NaNoWriMo’s weird-and-wise founder himself: Chris Baty. Today, he explains the magic power of a writer’s deadline:

When I actually sat down to write my first novel back in 1999, I discovered that my ideas about novel writing were woefully mistaken. You don’t need a plot before you write a novel, nor do you need an evocative sense of place or a winsome, engaging cast. You don’t even need coffee (though I still haven’t allowed myself to fully come to terms with that yet). What you really need is a secret weapon.

You need a superpowered, diabolical device that will transform you into a bastion of literary accomplishment. And I’m happy to report that this implement is in the house, and it’s just waiting for you to pick it up.

Read More

Facing Your Literary Mosquitoes

Throughout January and February, we’ve been focusing on perfecting those first drafts we wrote in November. Folks like Susan Bell, Marissa Meyer, and Hugh Howey have provided tomes of revision and publishing advice. As Camp NaNoWriMo’s April session approaches, we’re wrapping up our first-ever “Now What?” Months with our founder, Chris Baty:

Dear Novelists,

Once upon a time, there was a Panama Canal.

This is probably not the Panama Canal you’re thinking of. This was the first Panama Canal, attempted by the French in the late 1800s.

It was the most ambitious project the world had ever seen—not quite as tough as novel revision, but pretty close. France had just finished the Suez Canal, the Eiffel Tower dwarfed every structure on Earth, and French engineers had earned a reputation as bad-ass rock stars who could pull off the impossible.

Read More

7 Cool Facts with Chris Baty: the Alaska Edition

Grant and Chris A. have provided deeply poetic accounts of our recent trip to rural Alaska. In documenting the creative-writing workshops we held, the stories we heard, and all the inspiring people we met, they sadly left out one very important thing: random Alaska trivia. 

I’m here to fill that gap with seven cool facts we learned in southeastern Alaska:

Read More

The Dream Team: A Q&A with Chris Baty and Jen Arzt

Way back in the day, when many of us were still young and naive, and all the cows in the world were calves, the Office of Letters and Light had an executive director by the name of Chris Baty, and a Script Frenzy program director moniker-ed Jen Arzt. These storied figures came together for this year’s Frenzy as one mega-writing-team, a scripting Megazord, if you will. Taking time from this meeting of their creative minds, Chris and Jen sent us this missive in which they interview each other about first kisses, wooden eyeballs, and the co-writing process so far:

Chris: This is the first time you’ve collaborated on a screenplay with someone. What important life lessons have you learned from working with me?

Jen: Coffee tastes better with a friend at your table.

Chris: Our screenplay is loosely based on an 1890s ghost story we made up involving a vanishing train and a seven-foot-tall murderer with a wooden eyeball. Neither of us knows anything about trains or wooden eyeballs. What were we thinking?

Read More

“I’m Making My Script Frenzy Script!” A Q&A with Stephen Norrington

As Script Frenzy grows, more and more established filmmakers are getting in on the fun. Writer/director Stephen Norrington, best known for directing Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, began shooting his Script Frenzy screenplay in Los Angeles this year. We checked in with Stephen via the interwebs to see how the project was going.

Your current film project has its origins in Script Frenzy. What’s the story there? In 2008 I was developing Clash of the Titans but it wasn’t going well. Warner Brothers were lukewarm on my “vision” and I wanted to rewrite their expensive script. In the six months or so it took them to fire me, I cast around for something else I could do to stay productive. Script Frenzy 2008 was happening at that time so I leapt in, blazing with all the art power that Warner Brothers had squelched. The result was “Untitled Norrington Genre Project #1”, a car chase action fest that turned out great, best script I’ve written in years.

The life-changing thing about the experience was the absolute exhilaration that came from writing whatever came to mind, no need to ask permission from the suits. After Script Frenzy finished I was still on fire so I wrote two more scripts and embarked on two more writer-director development deals. The scripts turned out great but the deals evaporated. In late 2010, I took stock and realized that a) HD camera technology had finally become truly affordable and b) I had the scripts, the know-how, some cash and the time to attempt to make my own movies in-house, no studio required. So here we are.

Read More

Six Crucial Questions for Keith Blount of Scrivener

Each year, we interrogate one or two NaNoWriMo corporate sponsors on the OLL blog. It’s our way of saying thanks for the vital funding that our sponsors contribute to NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program. Today, I asked the generous, mysterious Keith Blount of Scrivener some hard-hitting questions about halogen light bulbs, children as coders, and the pernicious rumor that his software contains a virtual homunculus who will write your novel for you if you awaken it properly.

(And yes, that’s Keith in the Obi-Wan bathrobe, above.)

So Scrivener’s parent company is called Literature & Latte—clearly a touching homage to Letters and Light. Do you prefer incandescent or compact fluorescent bulbs?

Well, as much as we do love Letters and Light, “Literature & Latte” was what I always intended to call my bookshop café—but unfortunately I was too lazy to run one, so I applied it to a software company instead. That theoretical café would almost certainly have been lit by energy-saving tornado bulbs with bayonet caps. Mind you, I also have as much of a soft spot for halogen spot light bulbs as the next man.

Read More

The Email That Launched NaNoWriMo

Fast Company magazine has been running an intriguing series called Starred, where they showcase innocuous emails that went on to do surprisingly big things. It inspired me to dig through my old Yahoo! account and see if I could find the email I sent out to my friends in 1999 inviting them to take part in a ridiculous book-writing endeavor I’d hatched the night before. Here’s that email, in all of its exuberantly imperfect glory.

From: Chris Baty
To: friendlist
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 1999 8:51 PM
Subject: national novel month

Hear ye! Hear ye! Come one, come all, and dust off those word-processing devices!

Under the motto “A lousy novel is better than no novel at all,” I have declared July National Novel-Writing Month.

To celebrate, I want to write a novel. In a month. And I want you to write one too.

Read More

Donation Day Thank You!

Thank you so much to everyone who donated or bought something in the OLL store for Donation Day yesterday! In 24 hours, you contributed $51,645! As the parent nonprofit of NaNoWriMo, we’d think it a feat to reach 50,000 units of anything in a short amount of time. But raising that much money for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program makes us absolutely ecstatic. And so, so grateful.

We had over 1,400 people donate yesterday. That’s the kind of grassroots support that most nonprofits would give their organizational eyeteeth for. To our amazing donors on Donation Day and throughout the year—we appreciate you so much, and we look forward to using your contribution to make the world a more inspiring place.

- Chris B.

Today is Donation Day! Hooray!

We’re a grassroots, participant-funded nonprofit. If you believe in what we do, please keep NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program going strong by making a donation. Our goal today is $100,000. Thank you so much for helping us give a creative boost to kids and adults around the world this fall!

NaNoWriMo Newlyweds

Sometimes we get emails that are so good we just can’t keep them to ourselves. This email from Jonny in Brighton is one of those. We post it here with his kind permission.

Dear all at the Office of Letters and Light,

In 2009, prompted by a customer at Borders in Leeds, UK, where I worked at the time, I signed up to NaNoWriMo.org for the first time. Not four days into my time looking around the forums, gathering ideas for my first novel and checking out other people’s synopses, I received some NaNoMail from a Bay Area, CA resident named Kristina Casto who was looking for overseas writing buddies and a chance to share her previous three years’ NaNo experience. We got talking on MSN messenger and shortly after on Skype, and soon realised we had much more in common than we thought. By the time NaNoWriMo 2009 was over, Kristina already had plans to visit me in the UK, and we knew we were looking at something special. (Incidentally, I still want to finish my novel from that year, which involved a religion based around the music of David Bowie. It’ll happen one of these days.)

Read More

“I Sold My NaNoWriMo Novel!” A Q&A with Anna Sheehan

Writer Anna Sheehan sold her 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, A Long Long Sleep, to Candlewick Press in the US. Since then, the young-adult novel has been snapped up by publishers in Russia, Brazil, France, Germany, and the UK (where it was bought in a three-book deal). The book came out in the States this August. We spoke with Anna through the interwebs to get the scoop on her internationally adored book.

Read More