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Episode 28: Chris Baty: National Novel Writing Month, Creativity, and Life as a Narrative
17 Plays4 years ago
Since 1999, National Novel Writing Month has exploded in popularity, becoming one of the most creatively productive events in the world every November. Participants buckle down and write a 50,000-word novel in a month, many enjoying the social support from the NaNoWriMo community.
Founder Chris Baty joins us to talk about what he's been up to lately, as well as share some thoughts gained from his writing career. We talk about creativity, the power (or not-power, depending on your inclination) of narrative, what we would contribute to a post-apocalyptic team, and the anxiety of wanting to contribute more.
Special Guest: Chris Baty.
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Transcript
Humorous Opening: Creative Writing and World-Ending
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's a beautiful thing. It's one creative writing non-profit, but many paths to ending the world. All right.
Introduction to Guests
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to Cog Nation. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy.
00:00:21
Speaker
And with us today, our guest is Chris Beatty. Hi, Chris. Hi. Hi. Hi. Chris is the founder of National Novel Writing Month. And he is going to talk to us today a little bit about some of the things he's been up to. And also, we may get into talking a bit about creativity.
Chris Beatty's Current Projects
00:00:42
Speaker
So, Chris, thanks a lot for joining us today. And what's on your mind?
00:00:48
Speaker
What is on my mind? It's a great question. I am currently between jobs and so my kind of full-time effort right now is focused on trying to finish a long-suffering novel draft that I've now been working on
00:01:06
Speaker
kind of piecemeal for about eight years. And I have this really nice deadline, which is that I'm starting a new job on August 10th. And my goal is to have a final draft done by then. So I'm waking up early, trying to get as much time in as possible, and trying not to panic and weep a lot, which is difficult when looking at the quality of this draft.
00:01:28
Speaker
Do you want to say anything about the book that you're working on right now, or is this top secret material?
Novel Set in Post-Apocalyptic America
00:01:35
Speaker
We can embargo the podcast as they say in the business. Exactly. If you could avoid shipping this podcast until after my novel is sold, published, and has reached kind of an Oprah level of fame, I think that would be great.
00:01:47
Speaker
I think the idea behind it, it's kind of a coming of age story that's kind of funny and warm set in a kind of post-apocalyptic America with this group that has been kind of hiding in the mountains. And one of the members of this group ends up going to Canada to kind of find himself and start a new life. We love post-apocalyptic. That's one of our favorite topics on the show.
00:02:14
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of it and I will sign both of you up for a presale. It's $39.95 and that comes with an autograph. It's a digital copy. The autograph is mostly imaginary, but it's a good deal. Cool. Now, if we were going to give a podcast discount, what would that podcast discount code be? That included the discount. That's it. That's the price.
Origin of NaNoWriMo
00:02:36
Speaker
Do you want to talk a little bit about National Novel Writing Month and maybe a little bit about how that came about?
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So this is a great group to be telling the story with because Rolf was there for the inception of all of it. And Joe, I feel like you were also kind of in and around this miasma of terrible first drafts that was emerging. I didn't participate in that first one, but I remember you guys doing it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:03:05
Speaker
So I think the idea, Rolf, you can really fact check me here, started back in 1999. And I was in my mid 20s and I think had a lot of energy and not a lot of familial responsibilities. And so I had always loved reading books and had grown up being the super avid reader. And I just kind of hit this moment when I was like, I really want to try writing a book. But I also knew myself well enough to know that
00:03:32
Speaker
Typically, it seemed like books took many years to write and that I didn't have the attention or follow through to actually pull that off. I was also very intimidated by the idea of writing a book. I think because I had seen these authors that I'd admired growing up as these kind of these like Jedi otherworldly figures that had some abilities or talents in world building and storytelling that I definitely knew I didn't.
00:03:56
Speaker
And so it was scary but exciting. And I knew that in order for me to really like stick with it, if I could rope some friends into doing it with me, that we all would set this goal of writing a novel. And that if we could make the deadline just like super terrifying and very quick, I think it would help me focus on it. And that's kind of how National Novel Writing Month was born. I sent out an email to a bunch of people, including Rolf, and said, hey, I want to,
00:04:24
Speaker
tackle this challenge of writing 175 page novel, which later became 50,000 words, which is like, that's kind of a short, shortish novel, like a catcher in the rye kind of length novel. And we're going to do it in a month. The first year was in July and 21 people, including myself, ended up signing on for that. And then we ended up having like such an unexpectedly good time and would get together and we kind of made it
00:04:48
Speaker
I think writing, especially book writing, is often a very solitary pursuit. And we made it like a kind of a social endeavor where we would get together and keep each other company while we wrote and we'd write for 40 minutes and then talk about how terrible our writing was for 20 minutes and then go back in and write for another 40 minutes. And there was something about that, like making writing a social activity that really unlocked this huge amount of
00:05:10
Speaker
potential, I think, in all of us.
Growth and Impact of NaNoWriMo
00:05:12
Speaker
And we sort of discovered this fact that I think if you start writing and you keep writing, like pretty amazing things happen, surprising things happen. And the book often takes on this kind of life of its own and characters do things that you didn't know they were going to do. And it was just a pretty amazing experience. I think it was sort of like it was just it was almost like there was this part of our brains that we had been
00:05:35
Speaker
living alongside for our whole lives, but just really hadn't used much since childhood. When I think, you know, imaginative play is really just like a core part of, that's like your job as a kid, right? Is to kind of imagine these worlds and have these action figures be talking to each other. And, but at some point, I think around puberty, we get very embarrassed by having action figures that talk to each other. And so we stop, we just stop doing that. And I think this experience of like trying to fit this big sprawling,
00:06:04
Speaker
world into this very small time frame kind of brought back that same spark of play and kind of turning off that self-critical voice that we bring to a lot of our adult endeavors, especially ones when we're not totally comfortable or feeling like we're in our element. And so I think that first year was just like, oh wow, this was great. Six of us ended up crossing that 50,000 word finish line. And I think I realized like, okay, so if
00:06:29
Speaker
If we did this and had a good time, this is something that really like anybody can do and have a good time. And so I put up a website the next year and it grew from the 21 to 140 people. And then the year after that, it was 5,000 and then 14,000. And it just kept growing and growing in this really unexpected way since then. And now at this point, I think it's the world's largest creative undertaking. It produces over a billion words of fiction each year, 300,000 kids, teens, and adults do it.
00:06:59
Speaker
thousands of schools around the world. There have been dozens of New York Times bestsellers that started out as National Novel Writing Month manuscripts. And it's really become this really interesting, I think like a creative kick in the pants for people like me that maybe knew that they had always wanted to write a book but just didn't quite know how to make time for it or how
Social Encouragement in Writing
00:07:23
Speaker
to get it done. And I think a deadline really helps with that.
00:07:27
Speaker
Not to mention the social pressure too, I think, or social support. I guess this was around the time. I'm trying to think if Friendster was even around then, but this is in pre-social media days and having someone to take a laptop with and go work at a coffee store.
00:07:46
Speaker
And just a lot of people being aware of the fact that you're writing a book, sort of encouraging you to do that. I think that's sort of standard behaviorist ways of encouraging something to happen, right? Yeah, and I think it really gets to this idea of like, I think different personality types really respond well to different encouragements. Some people need carrots, some people need sticks, some people don't need any carrots or sticks to get things done. And I think for those of us that
00:08:15
Speaker
that tend to prioritize the things in life that other people ask us to do as compared to the things that just we personally want to do but that there's no real nobody's going to be there to say hey where's that novel right or nobody's going to be upset if we don't write that novel and I think there's something about Rolf like you said this idea that oh well you know there are dozens of people out there that I've now told I'm taking part in this ridiculous challenge and I've told them that I'm going to have a novel by the end of the month and I don't
00:08:44
Speaker
I don't wanna let him down. I wanna be able to say, okay, yeah, I did it. And there's something really powerful in that. Yeah, that's really cool. I was struck by that you mentioned that there are dozens of New York Times bestsellers that came out of this process. How many of those books do you think just would never have been born if not for this incentive?
00:09:07
Speaker
It's hard because really one of the things that the lessons that I think you learned from taking part in National Novel Writing Month is that writing the first draft, especially its 50,000 words, is really just the start of such an epic journey. And you have to have so much discipline and follow through and focus
00:09:23
Speaker
to really get that thing to the point of publication. So I'm gonna guess that the people that really did that, that walked that road probably would have done some version of it anyway, but I doubt it would have been that exact book. And one of the interesting things is National Novel Writing Month grew. It really started out as this kind of
00:09:42
Speaker
fringe quirky internet thing and that was kind of what a lot of the early when it would get covered by newspapers or TV it was kind of like look at these wacky internet people writing novels in a month and but over time it really became a kind of more valued and respected part of
00:09:58
Speaker
a writing community and a writing process and I think a lot of these successful writers that already had book contracts and agents would use National Novel Writing Month just to help them move along and get unstuck from their own, you know, it's I think really easy to get in your own head when you're writing and you start
00:10:14
Speaker
evaluating the quality of every sentence or every word. And I think there was something liberating about this idea of a month of pure output. So we started seeing more and more respected writers kind of writing these really nice essays saying that this is great, that this is helpful, that this is not
00:10:31
Speaker
This is not, I think as some people had kind of posited, this is not like mocking literature or devaluing the written word. But in fact, it's the opposite. It's helping give people a little bit of encouragement and a voice that they maybe wouldn't have had on their own.
00:10:48
Speaker
Before the show, we were talking a little bit about creativity and what the nature of creativity is, and if someone's good at one thing, are they good at another thing? Do you think that in this process that there are some people who are just good writers naturally, or is it something that is learned? How do you think about that in your
Writing as Creative Exercise
00:11:06
Speaker
experiences with this?
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I teach a NaNoWriMo class through Stanford's Continuing Studies program once a year, usually in the fall. And I definitely get that question a lot from people that say, I don't even know if I should be in this class. I don't see myself as a writer. I love the idea of this challenge. I love the idea of creating a novel, but I'm not a writer.
00:11:30
Speaker
I think that notion of like who is a writer, who deserves to call themselves a writer is such a challenging one. And I wish that it were not, it's I think a source of kind of stress for a lot of people, including me. I mean, even as somebody who's been writing professionally for a long time, there's something that I, it feels very nerve wracking to stand up and say I'm a writer in the same way that you might say I'm an artist. But I think that's, to me, that,
00:11:59
Speaker
The revelation of National Novel Writing Month was that just that writing feels good, even if the quality of the writing itself is bad. There's just something about stepping into this world that we have made with our own imagination and kind of seeing what unfolds that day as you kind of move your character across the page.
00:12:15
Speaker
And that feels good ultimately whether you think this book is publishable or whether you feel like you will become a professional or not. I think for everybody, just the act of creative play is kind of sustaining and enriching and rewarding. I know I'm in a better mood when I've had some amount of kind of like creative workout in the same way that I think a lot of people feel better when they've gone running or played some basketball or something like that.
00:12:40
Speaker
But I think when there is this bigger question, which is just like, OK, so every year something like 30,000 people write the 50,000 words. So we have 30,000 winners every year. Of those, very few may turn that into a publishable draft. And what is the difference between somebody who sets out to do that and ultimately sells it to a New York publishing house versus somebody that doesn't?
00:13:06
Speaker
And are there other equally valid paths along that way? So self-publishing is a really, obviously, a huge one. And it's become an ever bigger part of what happens after NaNoWriMo. There are probably now tens of thousands of self-published novels out there that started as National Novel Writing Month novels. And I do think that I think some people, in my experience, have an innate gift for wordsmithing. I think that you can read their sentences, and you're just
00:13:35
Speaker
It's like your jaw just drops where you're like, how did they do that? How did they get such a perfect description of this person's, the way they look, or how did they just kind of like drift inside of this person's thoughts and capture an entire worldview?
00:13:54
Speaker
I think that there are some people that just have that aptitude in the same way that there are people who are just really good cellists, you know, or who can speak 17 foreign languages and they don't really think about it. But I do think that to me, the act of writing is, it benefits everybody. Everybody feels better when they do it. And so I think that's kind of my sidestepping answer to that bigger question of like, can everybody be a great writer?
00:14:22
Speaker
Can I ask you guys a question? Yeah. Yeah. OK. So here's something that I think a lot about apocalypse skills, where I think about, OK, so the world falls into
Variability in Learning and Skills
00:14:34
Speaker
ruin. What can I offer in exchange for food? What skill could I bring to the table? And I think about friends who are just really have this knack for fixing things or building things or tinkering with engines. To them, mechanics and mechanical things just makes sense to them.
00:14:51
Speaker
they don't make sense to me. And I just feel like writing is gonna, like my ability to make like a really good sign for somebody is not gonna get me or my family very much in the apocalypse. And I think that that notion of having like, having certain skills or abilities that are in these like very practical domains has always been really interesting to me because I don't have them. And so my question, I think to you both is like,
00:15:19
Speaker
Are people, let's say somebody that's just like really good at working on engines, the engines have always made sense to them. Were they born with something different in their brains? Well, I definitely think it's the case that, you know, there are different types of innate abilities that people have in the sense that, or actually I don't, that's not the right term, innate capacities. So I think about it from the perspective of like in the case of cognition, which is really, you know, my expertise and Ralph's expertise as well, you know,
00:15:48
Speaker
We talk about cognitive abilities, and we've done a lot of work on this in different ways, analyzing people's cognitive abilities and also their ability to improve on those abilities. And it's definitely the case that people can improve on cognitive abilities. Any ability that you have that requires you to process information, those are all things that you can improve on, but they're also limited to some extent or bounded to some extent by innate capacities.
00:16:16
Speaker
In addition to that, you have the thing of what people did when they were young because in the critical period of development, your brain is much more plastic and able to adapt and evolve and change. So things that you learn when you're young, especially if they have to do with language or music or these sorts of abilities like that,
00:16:39
Speaker
tend to be things that are going to be much better if you learn them when you're young than if you try to learn them for the first time when you're older. And some things you will just never be able to learn. So for example, if you're learning a certain type of language, you might lose the ability to hear certain phonemes or sounds in a different language that don't exist in your language.
00:17:03
Speaker
after a certain age, maybe eight or nine years old. And so some of these things are just a function of that. Some of them are a function of people are just different genetically as well. But at the same time, there's so much you can learn. And I think so from that perspective, I don't know that it's hard to say that engines would be something that anyone would necessarily innately be good at because that's something you have to learn. You have to learn how they work or else you won't be able to engage with them.
00:17:33
Speaker
So it's probably some combination of innate capacity, propensity, so interest in something, being oriented towards it, and then learning at an early age and then getting feedback. I think the other thing that was striking me as you were talking, Chris, was the idea of the social feedback part.
00:17:53
Speaker
is so important. I mean, you were talking about in the local sense of like your friends were around and hanging out and writing. But it's also like to me is like a big difference between writing to be read, writing for yourself. And then if you're writing to be read, are you writing for a large audience? Are you writing for a specific audience? And what kind of writing is that? You know, there's very different types of writing
00:18:15
Speaker
depending on who your audience is. If it's like a technical writing, for example, in writing a journal article, I became pretty good at that. And I felt quite confident in my ability to convey information in a scientific journal in that form. But I don't know that that translates. Or I feel like it would not translate to writing a novel, for example.
00:18:39
Speaker
It's interesting, though, that that notion of early praise being key in developing these skills, and I think you're right that probably everybody that is gifted at something and I think everybody is gifted uniquely gifted at something usually some things that there was probably a moment when they.
Influence of Early Acknowledgement
00:18:57
Speaker
wielded that thing or tried that thing while other people were watching. And they got that moment of like, whoa, wow. You know, I feel that having a five year old son where, you know, it's like we're playing this board game, Labyrinth, where you kind of move pieces around on this maze and create these paths. And he's just he's like really good at it and he's better at it in some ways than I am. And I think that, you know, and I just keep saying you're so good at this, Henry.
00:19:21
Speaker
And I think those moments do kind of start to solidify these things of like, oh, this is what I'm good at and I'm not getting praise at this other thing. And I wonder how much of an outsized effect that the noticing, the kind of public acknowledgement of these achievements has on kind of altering the trajectory of what people end up getting into and spending time doing.
00:19:42
Speaker
Well, I think people, I mean, obviously it's going to be somewhat complicated because you can certainly be interested in things that you're not necessarily great at. And I guess I think of myself a little bit too. When I was a kid, I was really interested in motors and tinkering and a lot of that stuff. And I wasn't really great at it, but I just had a real interest in it.
00:20:04
Speaker
and then a few years ago I kind of took this stuff up more and just I like learning about it and I like
00:20:13
Speaker
I mean, my interest is there, but I don't necessarily have, I'm never going to be a superstar at it. So it's always going to be a kind of a hobby. I think I could relate this back to one of our previous episodes too, because I think we can link some of this interest in learning stuff up with dopamine.
Role of Dopamine in Motivation
00:20:30
Speaker
So we talk about on the show that Michael Frank was on, we talked about dopamine being
00:20:37
Speaker
something that's used for reinforcement, something that causes people to want to repeat a behavior again. So when you're getting that jolt of dopamine, you want to perform something again, you're enjoying it, you're having a good time doing it. So if you're playing guitar, you're enjoying it in the moment and you want to keep repeating it. So the more you practice, the better you're going to get at it. And likewise with
00:21:02
Speaker
novel writing too. I'm sure that some people may want to write a novel because they want to be famous, but they don't necessarily like sitting down and typing and actually writing the words and going through some of the more painful parts of the process. So I think where your interest lies is someone who wants to be a great
00:21:26
Speaker
writer without wanting to put the work in, of course, is not going to be a great writer because the real interest is not in the process of writing, I guess. What you're talking about, Chris, is the real enjoyment of the actual process of writing, not thinking of yourself as a famous author or anything like that, but just purely getting into the flow or the creative moment.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think it gets down to this question of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I have a friend, Tom Anarelli, who's an organizational psychologist. He teaches at INSEAD and he did his PhD dissertation.
00:22:08
Speaker
was and still is a huge music nerd and so he looked at all these musical artists and kind of talked about them on the spectrum of kind of innovation and really found that those that were the most innovative that really changed the nature of what we thought of as songwriting or song craft
Intrinsic Motivation in Music Innovation
00:22:27
Speaker
we're all really fueled by intrinsic motivation and didn't really talk about these external rewards. But I have a question, which is, you know, I think sometimes when we do have a kind of a natural or innate ability or aptitude at something, I think we sometimes undervalue it because it feels like it comes easy to us. And I think as a result, sometimes people don't, you know, it's like somebody may have a real gift for art, but they're like, oh, whatever, it's just, I can,
00:22:56
Speaker
I can draw, that's something I always did. And so they don't end up kind of developing it because they don't see it as special or unique. Do you find that to be the case in your own lives? Like, are there certain things that you feel good at, but that you just, you're like, eh, I'm good at it. Eh, not all that interesting. Well, I was struggling to make, I was thinking about this idea the other day that everybody has a talent or everybody's good at something. And I was kind of wondering that, because I'm not really sure that I am good at anything.
00:23:25
Speaker
or like exceptional or, you know, really good at something. I think you're, I mean, you're a really good scientist, a really good professor. I'm sure I haven't taken your classes, but I've TA'd with you and I know that you're a good teacher. Well, but I mean, I guess I want to be an accept, you know, I want to be able to juggle 40 things at a time. And, you know, I guess I think of maybe I think of it as sort of a talent show kind of. Right. A talent show type talent. Yeah. Like what would you like do if you had to be on
00:23:54
Speaker
like a talent show and do something to entertain people. I think this gets to this question of like, again, it's like, who is it for? I think this is like so central to this whole conversation, I think. And it gets back to the idea of my central hypothesis around like, what is an intelligence or what is an ability, which is like, it's all about what are your goals, you have to always evaluate everything in terms of your goals.
Evaluating Goals and Abilities
00:24:17
Speaker
We're all getting at the idea of what is someone's motivation, and that's a big part of it. I think that relates back to this idea of what are you trying to achieve? What are your goals? Because I think if you can evaluate what your goals are, what you're trying to get out of it, then I think it's a lot easier to understand how good or how good you could be at something. That's a great way to frame it.
00:24:38
Speaker
How would you think about a goal as an author, Chris? How would you describe what people would be satisfied with if they were doing it right?
00:24:50
Speaker
I think that really varies by person. And I do think if people are being honest, they do want to be widely read. They want their book to be successful. I think people, including me, would say, well, as long as I could find 12 people who really love this book and really get it, and it really means something, then that's
Challenges of Finishing Novels
00:25:08
Speaker
success. Or the thing I tell myself constantly is, I just need to finish this. Really, I struggle a lot with finishing
00:25:15
Speaker
novels for these big projects. I've started, I mean, literally like 16, 17 of them. And I just haven't really gotten to the point where I feel like any of them are really done. And I think that to me is a marker of success is just feeling like this is done. The truth is I don't think I'll ever feel it's done. I have a kind of perfectionistic streak and I'm always going to be very self-critical about the quality of it. So I don't know. That's a it's a good question. But Ralph, can we get back to you feeling like you're not exceptional at anything?
00:25:42
Speaker
Well, I just maybe I am thinking of it in more of a sort of show off, like something I can show off, like I just don't have that. I mean, my voice is pretty off pitch. You have it. You've heard me sing.
00:25:58
Speaker
in Rockstar probably. It's pretty awful. But here's something that I will say. I think that's a very constrained definition of talent, the talent show definition of talent. Because I think a lot of people's skills, including something like writing, nobody's going to want to watch somebody write a paragraph on stage. But somebody may be very gifted at that. And I think, Ralph, one of the things I will say about you is also
00:26:20
Speaker
I think you have an amazing sense of humor. And I think that that is a rare gift that you probably don't think about a lot, but I think is very much a part of who you are, this kind of exceptional ability to kind of offer this a deadpan assessment or some sort of just a funny quip. And that's a skill that I think probably got nurtured over time. And people probably told you when you were in high school, oh, you're Rolf, he's really funny. But I think it's interesting.
00:26:47
Speaker
when i question i guess i think i did just uh just in high school i think i was named wackiest slash dizziest if that counts for anything i knew it neither of those things are really about humor they seem to be about more about brain impairment i do think that
00:27:02
Speaker
Do you think that when we think about this idea of aptitudes, how far away are we from an aptitude map?
Complexity of Aptitude Testing
00:27:12
Speaker
In the same way we sequence a genome, we could sequence somebody's potential abilities in foreign language, music, art, mechanics, spatial reasoning. How far away are we from getting a printout of that? Well, it's really
00:27:32
Speaker
We're not that close. I mean, we're farther away than I wish we were. I spent way too much time working on this problem and thinking about this problem. And ultimately, I don't want to say I gave up, but I decided to work on other things. I think we really did feel like we had taken it as far as we could take it, given the tools and what we had to work with.
00:27:57
Speaker
at the moment. Technology will help, and especially with brain imaging. So mapping brain imaging, understanding of underlying neural processes to behavior will help. But where things have gotten constrained, and there's a lot of debate and a lot of literature written on this topic, a ton. And it's gotten to become extremely contentious. And that's part of why I decided to move on to other things. But the issue is, again, it's around assessment.
00:28:28
Speaker
Because how do you decide if somebody is good at something becomes the fundamental thing? So that's why I mentioned, our pre-limb conversation was this idea of testing. So if you take an intelligence test, this is where a lot of this research comes out of is like the intelligence and aptitude testing. So you can think of this as a continuum from like early 1900s and Benet, Stanford Benet on into like the SAT today.
00:28:58
Speaker
and this whole range of trying to get a sense of by taking a test is someone going to be able to do something that you want them to do. And it turns out that when it comes to things like school and work, where work is white collar work and desk job nowadays in front of a screen most of the time, it actually works really well. You give someone a test, it almost doesn't matter what the test is. It almost doesn't even matter.
00:29:22
Speaker
There are so many tests that are predictive because they all sort of load on this overall factor, which is called G, which is what's referred to as general intelligence, which I think is incorrectly referred to as general intelligence. I think it's just a statistical anomaly of the way that tests work. But that's like a whole other show. But the idea is that people who are good at taking a test in one area, like say, for example, vocabulary, tend to be good at taking, for example, memorizing a set of digits.
Qualities of Good Writing
00:29:51
Speaker
Uh, and there are a lot of reasons why that might be, but I think a lot of them have to do with just this thing of being good at taking a test, right? A certain kind of test. So it really gets back. That's why, that's why I've brought up this issue of goals. Like you got to have this idea of like wordsmithing.
00:30:13
Speaker
And I think this is a great example. Is someone a good writer if they are a good wordsmith? Or are they a good writer if they can tell a good story? And what is the relationship between those two things? And which is more important? It really depends on your goals, right? It tends to be that they go together, but not always. And you see people who are really good storytellers.
00:30:33
Speaker
But their sentence structure is sort of basic or otherwise not very or overly wrought. And vice versa, you have people who can produce good copy but aren't necessarily storytellers. And I think to achieve something in the world, it takes a combination of capacity and that ability, which comes from work and practice, and then also propensity.
00:31:02
Speaker
an orientation towards doing something, wanting to do it, actually spending time, whether you want to do it or not do it.
00:31:08
Speaker
All of those things will determine whether someone's successful at doing something. We make a lot of these aptitude tests because they're predictive, but the reasons why they're predictive are not the reasons why we would want them to be predictive. For example, socioeconomic status, a certain upbringing, an orientation towards the culture, what's expected of you when someone asks you a question, how is that question supposed to be answered?
00:31:37
Speaker
Those are the kinds of things that I believe really are most predictive about why people are good at taking tests.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You've made this woefully and rightfully complicated, Joe. I just really wanted to print out. And it sounds like you have now problematized this in 7,000 different smart ways. Yeah. I mean, even when you think about artistic ability, where it's like, OK, so are you asking somebody to look at a picture of a horse and draw a horse? Is that artistic ability? Or is it somebody that has a kind of Picasso-esque ability to look beyond the horse
00:32:10
Speaker
and draw the horse's essence. And who's to say which one is more of an artistic achievement? And OK, shoot. All right. Well, yeah. And then if you think about this, for example, I really think we should come back to the narrative thing, because I think that's like an interesting topic in and of itself, the ability to tell a story. Because I was thinking about this as you were talking, Chris. It's like, sounds like you're also very good at telling stories. And I think that's probably a lot of where the writing comes in there. And that's a framework from which you can tell stories.
00:32:40
Speaker
So that's part of it. But this idea of, for example, in musicianship, I listen to a lot of, I'm a big Grateful Dead fan, so I listen to a lot of different cover bands as a consequence of that because the Grateful Dead are no longer around per se, but there are a lot of different bands that play their music. And some of these musicians play the licks and the jams and actually sing just as well or better than Jerry Garcia did.
00:33:10
Speaker
But Jerry Garcia, no one would say that these are better musicians than Jerry Garcia. Something about putting together the playing for an audience, doing something to be heard and then being successful at that is itself, I think, a skill. Yeah. This is so interesting, but also so frustrating that it doesn't lend itself to the same level
00:33:38
Speaker
genome sequencing or something where you're just like, well, it's just going to be one of four things and it's a series of numbers. But maybe it's kind of great too, because in essence, you're talking
00:33:49
Speaker
a lot about magic, right? That there was something about Jerry Garcia that was just magical. And he was able to put these things together in a way that would be impossible to test for. It would be meaningless to test for. It's not quantifiable. It's just something you feel. And that's pretty awesome. Like that, I think, is that gets into this kind of higher level question of making art that moves people, that makes them feel something, that kind of changes the way they see their potential, that makes them feel alive in these new ways.
00:34:18
Speaker
And that's pretty awesome. And I think maybe that's my apocalypse skill is like, hey, the government has collapsed, you're feeling bad, but I'm gonna...
00:34:27
Speaker
I'm going to make you, I'm going to tell you a funny story and then I will get this kind of rotten pear that you have been holding on to. And I think that sounds good. That sounds good. Stories for pears. Maybe we should take a little break here. Sounds great.
00:35:10
Speaker
So welcome back. And again, our guest today is Chris Beatty, who founded National Novel Writing Month. And one of the things that I had mentioned to you just as a topic for the show and something that maybe was of interest is the idea of thinking of life as a collection of stories. So this came about because it was an essay by Galen Strawson, the philosopher,
00:35:39
Speaker
in a book called Things That Bother Me. And one of the things that he didn't feel as strongly as other people, I think, was this idea that what we are is a collection of narratives or a collection of stories and that life feels like a story as it's lived, that we're sort of working our way through this arc of life. And I'll just read some of the, I'll just read the first
00:36:06
Speaker
so that I can clarify what it is that he's talking about. And maybe some of these will make sense to you. So here are some claims I don't believe. So again, this is a list of things that he is not supporting. Here are some claims I don't believe. We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell. We invent ourselves, but we really are the characters we invent.
00:36:35
Speaker
We make sense of our lives by turning them into stories. We constitute our souls by making up our lives, that is, by weaving stories about our past.
Galen Strawson's View on Life Narratives
00:36:45
Speaker
In this one, what we call my life is but a constantly rewritten version of our own past. My life is the mental autobiography with which and by which we all live. What really happened is quite another matter, et cetera. And then he gives some other examples of this.
00:37:05
Speaker
So in Galen Strawson's view, life doesn't feel like a story or a narrative. So he finds that waking up in the morning, it feels like it's just another random sort of chaotic world out there, and it's not headed towards any particular trajectory.
00:37:26
Speaker
And he also, I think one of the interesting things about this is he sees this as a little bit of a personality feature that some people might be more inclined to think of life as a narrative that, you know, that they fit within. And some people don't feel that way at all. They mostly live in the present moment. They don't think about, you know, their story and where they should fit in. Life just sort of happens to them and it's not part of a larger structure. So anyways,
00:37:56
Speaker
This in mind, I wonder, Chris, if you've thought at all about or had any skepticism about the idea that where we are the stories that we tell or that life feels like a narrative that's being lived in a certain kind of a sequence. And here I'll give it to you and see if you have any thoughts about this.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah, I do. It's interesting that he says he doesn't believe that. So his point is that he's saying life then is, at least to him, just a semi random sequence of events. There's not really a lot of dot connecting that's happening for him, and that he feels pretty good with that. Or what was his? That it's not like that life isn't like, it just isn't experienced like that for him, that he doesn't, he doesn't
00:38:50
Speaker
He doesn't, it doesn't resonate with him. That's true. You know, I think a lot about stories and story structure. I think, so part of my class, this National Novel Writing with class that I teach, we have five weeks before people start writing their month-long novels. And so we spend about a week and a half on traditional classic story structure, which is often like,
00:39:09
Speaker
movie story structure, right, where you sort of start with a person in their everyday life, something is missing, they're probably not exactly sure what it is, then suddenly an opportunity or a challenge presents itself. They often kind of resist that. This is also often called the hero's journey.
00:39:27
Speaker
Exactly, something happens, they're pulled in, they're immediately over their heads, they make new friends along the journey. And it's fun teaching that because when you kind of lay it out on a grid and you show people, okay, exactly two thirds of the way through most books and two thirds of the way probably through all major Hollywood screenplays, the hero is at their lowest point, the cavalry is not gonna come, they're either close to death or some kind of metaphorical version of death.
00:39:56
Speaker
And then of course they rally and they may not win, but in the end, whatever they get, it is often the thing that was missing from their lives. So it may not be the pot of gold or the million dollars, but it's the friendship that they needed or a relationship with a family member. You kind of walk people through that and there's kind of like a gasp that happens because we've watched
00:40:18
Speaker
so many of these stories unfold without really recognizing what's going on with them.
Aligning Life Events to Classic Story Structures
00:40:23
Speaker
And I think when people write books and novels, there's something so satisfying about kind of knowing that there is this, there's an innate structure that people tend to respond to where there are setbacks and then there are successes followed by more setbacks. And I wonder,
00:40:39
Speaker
When we talk about people being good storytellers or making sense of their life through stories, if those are the people that are able to kind of map, kind of realign the events of their life to fit a traditional story structure, right? A more Hollywood version of that. And I did that with that NaNoWriMo story without even thinking about it, where it was kind of like, you know, we had this goal. It was kind of crazy. We had some setbacks, some successes.
00:41:03
Speaker
I'm curious about that. I definitely do think that people have a story about themselves. Let me ask you personally, does it feel like
00:41:16
Speaker
life is experienced or lived like a story, does it feel like you're in a certain part of the arc of your life or does it feel like? Yes. Yeah. And you know, you have a clear sense of what happened before and it's following a trajectory that you know how it's going to, well, not necessarily that you know how it's going to play out, but it, you know, you have an expectation about how things will go in general.
00:41:40
Speaker
I don't know about the future, but I think from now backwards, I think that we retell our story enough times as we meet new people, and they ask, oh, how did you get into the field? Or how did you end up moving to Rhode Island? And the version of that story that you tell now, Rolf, is probably pretty home, the how did you move to Rhode Island story? And I think that you've omitted a lot of details. You've moved certain key facts out of the story entirely. And you've created this pretty clean,
00:42:07
Speaker
narrative and i think that those things we tend to retell those key things about ourselves so many times um that i i i think you can't help but become the story that you're telling because you you start to see yourself in that same narrative even though that's really just a shorthand i think well what do you guys think i'm curious well i i mean i i think i see both sides of this because i would say that
00:42:34
Speaker
If you do start to see yourself as just the narrative that you've explained to other people over and over again, I mean, that seems like a pretty shallow description of yourself, right? And I'm sure there's always a lot more complexity and a lot more depth to people than we could imagine in a narrative like that.
00:42:56
Speaker
And I mean, yeah, we can we can tell the story of our life and we can imagine our earlier life like that. But I guess maybe for some people it doesn't feel as much as though they're they're sort of on the rails of this of this story. And and it might be a little bit it might be experienced just in a in a variety of ways. Yeah, I definitely feel that narrative structure and storytelling to myself is something that I
Personal Narratives and Productivity
00:43:28
Speaker
have, you know, that is it's very present with me. It's something that happened that I do a lot. I spent a lot of time thinking about my story and where I am in my story and how it relates to the timeline of my life and so on and so forth. Well, I'd like to hear that. So what is the what is the remaining arc? Well, yeah, the future again is hard to always in motion, always in motion the future is. But but yeah, I know the
00:43:58
Speaker
I definitely have had the sense, and Rolf, you and I have talked about this a little bit, that right now is that two-thirds mark, the low point, in some ways. In some ways, there's a lot of good stuff going on as well. Well, here is the only, the two-thirds, wait, two-thirds mark? Yeah. Of our life? Yeah, I mean, in a new era. No, no, no. Okay.
00:44:26
Speaker
The only narrative part of my life that I would sense strongly is that I'm planning on living to 140. I do have a current state and an end state. The thing about the storyline though is that, and this is totally true, right? Is that like most stories of a life are heavily weighted towards the beginning. So like two thirds of the book,
00:44:55
Speaker
It's not gonna be too, you're not gonna have to be, what is that like? 80 some odd years old to be two thirds of the way through your 140 year life in the book, in the narrative. You just need to be at the nadir. So you feel as though your life is a narrative and it feels like you're smack in the middle of that narrative. Yes. Chris, you feel as though your life is a narrative.
00:45:24
Speaker
I think it's like a series of contextual narratives, right? So there's like the work narrative. There's the family narrative. There's the like personal creative journey narrative. I think all of those have different stories. They're not kind of nicely packaged together into one story of Chris. Yeah, that resonates with me as well. I definitely feel that I, I, I said like the narrative that I, that I really feel that I, that I, that I think of the most as like being,
00:45:52
Speaker
A story that I've told a lot and that I think about a lot is the work productivity narrative. That's the one that is sort of most present for me. The other stuff is more like a series of smaller stories. That would be like the most, it would be told in like a book form. And then I think my relationships and my other pieces are more like would be like more stories that are kind of overlapping and, you know,
00:46:22
Speaker
maybe different episodes that are interrelated in that way. Yeah. Ralf, what's your take? What's the story, Ralf? I think that having a particular story is constraining. I don't think you should have a narrative because once you buy into a set personality or a set sort of
Constraints of Single Narratives
00:46:46
Speaker
set traits or habits or ideals or goals, I think it offers you less flexibility towards what you want to do in the future. Yeah, so I say, I don't feel as though I experience as much. I mean, everybody, you know, part of life certainly is experience as narrative, but I would say that, you know, day to day,
00:47:12
Speaker
I don't get a sense that it's part of this continuous line from my birth until my death and I'm at a certain point of it. That's not what's in the forefront of my mind most of the time.
00:47:31
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Well, there's there's an interesting thing that this is making me think of, which is like moments where your story gets disrupted. Right. And those tend to be like I think of National Novel Writing Month participation to be is often one of those moments for people who either didn't see themselves as a writer, didn't see themselves as creative, didn't see themselves as capable of following through on this project. And then they do it. And sometimes they're surrounded by people in their lives who actively are telling them that story, you know, oh,
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, you start so many things, you never finish them. And I think when you actually set this really ambitious goal, again, that could be writing, it could be writing a marathon, could be anything, and you achieve it unexpectedly, you have this level of success.
00:48:11
Speaker
I think that does force you to start asking these other questions. And this is something that I know I did after National Novel Writing Month, the first one. And I think a lot of people do, which is like, okay, if it turns out I'm capable of writing a reasonably okay first draft of a book in 30 days, like what else can I do? And for National Novel Writing Month participants, oftentimes they never go back and look at that book, but that starts this
00:48:34
Speaker
kind of open question of them wanting to look at that business that they always wanted to start but never did, or go back to taking violin lessons. And so many people end up coming out of that experience, I think, with their story of themselves broken in some way.
00:48:51
Speaker
That's a great, yeah. Do you have any other examples or are there any particular ones that come to mind? Because I mean, this also goes along with our talk of transfer of creativity and skills that you might, if you're good at one thing, you might apply your skills towards another thing too. So what kinds of things have people turned their lives to after doing NaNoWriMo?
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, it does. I mean, I think some of them are creative pursuits where people decide that they do want to go back and get maybe a college degree. For some people, it's an MFA in writing. But I think for other people, it's just that they see themselves in a different and more capable way. I had one really kind of heartbreaking, but also really happy making conversation when I went to Fort Collins, Colorado.
Power of Changing Personal Narratives
00:49:44
Speaker
talked at a library there and there's a big contingent of National Novel Writing Month participants in Fort Collins. And this woman came up to me afterwards and she just said, I just want to thank you for National Novel Writing Month. And she said, I was in a really abusive marriage and my husband said I wasn't capable of anything.
00:50:03
Speaker
I could never do anything, I wasn't worth anything and I had always wanted to write a book and so I found your website, I signed up and I didn't tell him that I was doing this and every night I would write and over the month I wrote a novel and
00:50:18
Speaker
At the end of that, that showed me that I was something. I could do something. I could make something. I could be something. And that was the impetus for her to get out of that marriage. She divorced him and now she's living on her own. She's happy. She does National Novel Writing Month every year. And I think that that changed. It really does, like, I think the story of her life that she had probably told herself was a pretty negative one.
00:50:40
Speaker
And it was one that involved a lot of probably putting up with this terrible inexcusable behavior from a husband. And I think at a certain point when you see a different
00:50:52
Speaker
possibility or potential for yourself, I think that that is pretty powerful. But I would guess that it was a story that had kept her in that marriage, but it was a story that also got her out of it. Looks great. Yeah, that is really good. It kind of makes me think, Rolf, I think what your critique of the narrative maybe relates to this idea, something that Alison Gopnik actually talked about when we were in graduate school.
00:51:23
Speaker
We had the different professors would come through. This is when we were in graduate school for psychology. The different professors would come through and tell their little stories about how they became professors and with the idea of trying to help you understand the paths that people have taken to become academics or whatever.
00:51:45
Speaker
And what she said was that the story that she's telling is just that. It's just a story. It's a convenient package. And the narrative itself that is attached to her actual life is itself not the same thing as her life. It's a way of making meaning and sense of her life, but it's not her life. It's different.
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really good. And I think maybe for me, the key would be to not be fooled too much by that narrative. And I guess you could think of the woman who is in the abusive relationship as being sort of fooled by that narrative or being negatively impacted by that narrative where maybe a different narrative would have a positive impact.
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah, 100 percent. And I think this kind of gets to this idea of like expectations as well. I mean, and with regards to mental health, you know, so much of our mental health and especially whether we're feeling depressed or feeling good about ourselves has to do with the mismatch between our expectations and what we are seeing around us, our expectations for ourselves and what we're seeing that's happening with ourselves around what we're doing on a day to day basis. And I think that expectation setting is so much about the narrative.
00:53:00
Speaker
Less about the actual things that are happening, but more about the expectation of what we think should be happening. And somehow if you can recast that narrative, it can be helpful in a variety of ways. Yeah, I would agree. I don't know if it's necessarily the same thing as narrative. I mean, I think it's a simpler description to talk about it as expectations.
00:53:26
Speaker
What's the difference there? You're just thinking because expectations don't necessarily have this like trajectory that this rising and falling trajectory over time. And they're more like somewhat more punctate or random constellation of stochastic events. Is that kind of what you're thinking there? I don't know.
00:53:52
Speaker
I thought it was a powerful question, Joe. I was going to ask the same questions, Rolf, so I'm glad you raised it. Cool, cool. Well, I mean, I think this, yeah, go ahead. One of the things I was going to say, too, is this, you know, there's something that is so uniquely satisfying about a movie or a book. And I'm so, I'm relentlessly curious about what is it about that, you know, my wife just finished reading Harry Potter 3 to my son. They just literally today just finished, you know, the last page. And
00:54:22
Speaker
that last page of a book feeling when things are really wrapping up, it just it always gives me chills. And I think for a lot of people, it's that last scene in the movie, right, where the music starts to play and those final thoughts are shared and people kind of walk off. And there's something about
00:54:39
Speaker
the shape of a book and the shape of a movie, which is a circle, right? So many times that the reason it feels satisfying is that the end ties back to the beginning. And I think of life as really is not a circle, but I think we look for circular shapes in our lives, things that feel like meaningful signs or coincidences and that kind of help tie
00:55:02
Speaker
that notion of who we were as children to who we are as adults, right? We're always looking for those callbacks. And that's what makes fiction so satisfying is these references that kind of echo across the work. And I think in life, maybe it's not a full narrative arc, but that we do love that notion of things that were meant to be, right? Or early indications of a future aptitude.
00:55:26
Speaker
So maybe it's just storytelling elements that people are using, even if they're not using the full one, just to kind of make life, which feels oftentimes chaotic and overwhelming, just feel more mapped to art and to the sense of something that means something and makes sense. So an analog to this, I guess, is in split brain patients where at least some researchers have suggested that
00:55:53
Speaker
One hemisphere is the interpreter. So if you take a split brain patient, so this is someone who said their cerebral hemisphere is split down the middle so that what you show to the left field of space is perceived by the right hemisphere of
Split-Brain Patients and Narrative Creation
00:56:10
Speaker
the brain. What you see in the right field of space is perceived by the left hemisphere of the brain. So someone in that situation that has an image flashed to their
00:56:19
Speaker
right hemisphere, which is their non-speaking hemisphere. They can't put into words what it is, but the left hemisphere can make a story about why they're doing something. So a classic example of this is showing an image to, what is it? They showed an image to the right hemisphere, which can't express itself in language, but
00:56:46
Speaker
It's a humorous image, so the person laughs. And then when you ask the person, well, why did you laugh at that? And they say, oh, you're just a cut up. You're just a funny guy.
00:57:00
Speaker
So the idea is that the brain is constantly always filling in the gaps and trying to perceive those patterns so that they can act on a whole entire pattern. And constructing a narrative is a way of doing that, I guess. So in a way, the brain is a pattern-perceiving machine. And it is constructing a narrative in the sense that it's
00:57:26
Speaker
that it's trying to anticipate the future, it's trying to put everything into a cohesive whole. But I guess the question for me is, does actual real life seem like it's experienced that way? Or is it just maybe partially an artifact of what my brain's struggling to do?
00:57:51
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Yeah, I think this makes me kind of think about that notion of kind of attention and what we pay attention to.
Autopilot Experiences Lacking Narrative
00:58:00
Speaker
And I think in day-to-day life, right, like our brains have really evolved to be this amazing, it's almost like this idea of like saving RAM usage on a computer, right? Like we kind of bundle and batch process things and once we've walked down our street enough times, we just stop noticing it, right? It's kind of on autopilot.
00:58:19
Speaker
And that seems like the opposite of meaning making and narrative making. And I think that really is the way we go through our lives, is ignoring as much as possible. That's the worst way to make a story. There's no details. You're missing everything. The only thing that's in your head is this probably sense of I'm late or I'm hungry or something, right? That's not a great story. Right, right. Yeah, that's a very boring story.
00:58:48
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think, yeah, it's interesting how that, you know, what you're paying attention to, what you find important, I think, you know, is really just central to, you know, how the story that you tell about yourself and, and what you think the story you're telling about others as well, like what you know, how you make meaning of what other people are doing too. So I think we're getting
00:59:15
Speaker
Towards the end of this conversation.
NaNoWriMo and the Robopocalypse Speculation
00:59:17
Speaker
It feels like one of the things that Chris that we always Yeah, are you doing the Robo apocalypse question or yeah? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly Yeah, so what are the things that we always do on this? Well, not always usually one of the things that we try to do On the show is to tie everything back to the Robo apocalypse so how
00:59:42
Speaker
I think you've already started down this road a little bit, Chris. But how do you think this conversation and this topic relates to how robots end up taking over the world? And also, in what sense is NaNoWriMo personally responsible for accelerating the rope apocalypse?
01:00:04
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. It's so funny, too, that this is the third mention of apocalypse and apocalyptic lifestyles that we've already had. I'm still trying to think of my value in the post-apocalyptic world. I know. What are you going to offer, Rolf? I don't know. I'm not sure. You can think about it. Yeah, I mean, NaNoWriMo is obviously a harbinger of the robo-apocalypse in so many ways. And it's almost hard for me to pick the top one. I think something...
01:00:33
Speaker
that comes to mind is there is this kind of a sense, an emerging sense of that, and this is this interesting field of study. I don't know if you've talked to anybody who does this, but they use machine learning to analyze the kind of core structure of, they'll look at like tens of thousands of books and then they'll kind of try to analyze the sort of like the valences of story of kind of ups and downs.
01:01:02
Speaker
And in doing this, they kind of are trying to unlock what is the code of a great story. And I think that we just got an email from a professor who is studying this, who was wondering if maybe he could have access to these 300,000 manuscripts that get started every year in National Model Writing Month to run this algorithm or whatever it is over them. And I had to tell him that, in fact, people
01:01:27
Speaker
don't really all they do is kind of upload a version of their manuscript that gets deleted immediately. We don't keep it. We just count it. But I do think that this is eventually these teams in that same kind of Jurassic Park style way will crack that code, right? They will figure out
01:01:43
Speaker
It's like 17,000 moves, and there are these little micro moves. And if you can do that dance exactly correctly, it's like unlocking this Nintendo Super Mario cheat code. And I think robots will get a hold of that and ultimately use it to destroy the human race. Well, I think that's good, but I have another possible scenario. Good. I'm really ready. Well, so I mean, how many people, about how many words did you say are being produced per year?
01:02:12
Speaker
over a billion now. Okay, so that's a lot of inventiveness and
01:02:19
Speaker
It's a lot of great exploring of different potential worlds, too. And somewhere in those billionaire words per year is probably a description of how to destroy the world. That's relatively accurate. So I think NaNoWriMo is just writing up blueprints on how to bring the Robopocalypse around. The more thinking people are doing, the more likely it's just going to all come to a bad end. Yeah, I like it. Joe, what do you got?
01:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, let's say along the same lines, basically thinking that one of these novels would just actually contain the correct description of how to build the robot that ultimately gains consciousness and makes other more powerful robots that then go on to take over the world, basically.
01:03:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's a beautiful thing. It's right. There's it's one creative writing nonprofit, but many paths to ending the world. That's always one of the kind of heartwarming things about national novel writing. That's right. That's right. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it. This was fun. I could do this every day. Can we do this every day? We can.