What Were the NaNoWriMo Dares?

The best way to describe the specific way I experienced the internet is “it was interaction and participation, not content.” My brother insisting that “everything is on the Wayback Machine or it can be streamed anyways” assumes that the internet was about consuming mainstream culture and maybe something involving pirates. My version of this was mostly the far fringes of what people were creating themselves and sharing. It’s probably similar to the way not everyone who was in the UK in the 1970s went to shows at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Not everyone who lived in Paris in the 1860s displayed art in the Salon de Refusés. Plenty of people in those places and times were working normal jobs, going about their business, entertaining themselves with the more mainstream culture at the time. The same is true for being able to log onto the internet even in the Wild West days. I suppose I could also compare it to Burning Man — participating and adding to the culture was the point.

- Excerpt from The Writing Dares Archive: Over 1,000 Strange, Surreal and Hilarious Writing Prompts to Challenge and Inspire

This soon-to-be released book is a collection of writing prompts that were posted on the NaNoWriMo forums. To my knowledge, they are not available anywhere else at this point in time.

Here's some examples of dares:

One of your characters must be an ex-flasher and peeping tom who is insanely afraid of lap dogs and automatic doors. He must mumble to himself or passerby, on at least three separate occasions, the words, “Don’t dawdle, don’t dangle, they’re after us all.”

Reference a character being injured by a stampede of emus. The character may be attacked while in a car.

I dare you to use at least one of the following as a supporting character in your novel: Kurt Harland (of Information Society); Jackie Chan; Sir Mix-A-Lot; Gackt, Dennis Leary.

Space ninja dinosaurs that rappel in through the windows.

3-5 nano writers to have their main characters appear in each others’ stories in either cameo or important roles, properly developed.

Dares could involve:

• A specific character (traits, name, quirks, actions, descriptions)
• Bits of dialogue
• An action or scene
• A weird literary or linguistic quirk
• Word play
• Cultural references
• Places (names, venues, etc)
• Entire plot ideas
• Items that show up in the novel for some reason

The running theme is mostly that they aren't normal ideas or challenges. One of my friends in college described it as "literary Dadaism." The absurdity and randomness was the entire point.

A side note on "Literary Dadaism":

I used to have the infamous Millennials to Snake People browser extension and it leaked into my real life. I kept referring to myself and my friends as "Snake People" consistently in real life. The peak of this experience was a night in 2014 when I was on a Lower East Side bender with a bunch of friends and joked about how we should all get matching snake tattoos because we're Snake People. Ever want something that will get you thrown out of a tattoo parlor on St Mark's? Try that idea.

Anyways. I joked about how "calling ourselves Snake People sounds like something that the Dadaists would have done in the 1920s. But I can't figure out why I have the aesthetics and sense of humor as a bohemian type who lived through World War I."

At this point, a friend in the group, a street medic from Occupy Wall Street, said, "have you heard the term 'Snada' yet? Snake People Dada."

So there's the deepest answer for a lot of the best bits of the Olde Internet: Snadas did that.

What do you think made Snadas so much like the avant-garde weirdos of the Lost Generation?

"Stacking Dares"

Sometimes, two different people would post dares that felt like they were meant to work together:

"Have an elderly individual tell someone never to stick their face in a bag of angry squirrels. The person advised about this of course should find themselves in a situation and remember it incorrectly resulting in the loss of their nose" and "One of your characters must advance the theory that squirrels and chipmunks are competing in an attempt to take over the world, and back this with evidence."

These two dares sound like they belong in the same story to me. Not only is there a bag of angry squirrels that maims a human character, but those angry squirrels in the bag now have their own side plot involving a rivalry with chipmunks. Are your human characters aware of this? Does the one pushing the theory ever get proven right? How far do the rodents go with their world domination scheme? How much will this overlap with the original plot you had?

I once "stacked" hundreds of these into one story.

Why did people post thousands of dares over the years?

• It's hilarious and weird, so why not?
• It was a good way to push through "writer's block" because of the sheer creativity and strangeness of the dares
• If the goal was simply to reach 50,000 words of fiction, these were a very good way to do that because of the way they made people take themselves less seriously while picking up ideas they wouldn't have had otherwise
• It became a beloved tradition
• People had ideas they didn't want to use themselves but didn't want to throw away entirely
• People had some scenes they liked so much they wanted to share the idea and let others replicate it

Why is this the thing that inspired NoctuWriMo?

Again... Snadas.