Profile of Chris Baty

Chris Baty began National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, with 21 San Francisco Bay Area friends in 1999. They weren't creative writers, but they all loved books and knew that they wanted to write one in their lifetimes. Of the 21, six of them succeeded that month in writing a novel, which they defined as 50,000 words -- the length of The Great Gatsby. The following year, 140 people participated, and it's grown exponentially each year since. Today, over 100,000 people take up Baty's vision each year as they race to write their own book in November.

In addition to running NaNoWriMo, Baty writes about music, travel, and culture for the Lonely Planet guidebooks, SF Weekly, the Washington Post, and the East Bay Express. He has also published a guide to NaNoWriMo called No Plot? No Problem!. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, he lives in the Bay Area.