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Professor Dundes, Caffe Strada, and me
Or how to write 50,000 words in 30 days
BY CHRIS BATY |
Four years after I graduated from Cal, I accidentally started a movement that now
produces more fiction than all of America's MFA programs combined. The year was 1999, and I was living
in Oakland, still trying to figure out what to do with my degree in cultural anthropology.
I had loved the anthro major as an undergrad, but by 1999 I was beginning to wish my
parents had browbeaten me into becoming an accountant. Or a trapeze artist. Or something more practical.
Instead, I had become The Creepy Guy Who Graduated Four Years Ago Who Sits Alone in Caffe Strada
All Day Reading. Somewhere in that haze of aimlessness and espresso, a very dumb idea was born.
My idea was to recruit as many of my friends as possible to write novels in 30 days. Each
of us would attempt our own 50,000-word books, and there would be neither judges nor prizes. Anyone
who made it to 50K would be a winner. I jokingly called it National Novel Writing Month, and 21 of us
signed on.
None of us knew the first thing about novel writing, but we were smart enough to realize
we'd never get through it alone. So after the starting gun sounded, we began meeting after work at local
coffee shops, where we'd break out our laptops and race one another to the day's word-count goal. Laggers
had to buy snacks for the speedier typists, and no one was allowed to go to the bathroom until they'd
produced 1,000 words.
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