“If, as some people believe, every single person has a novel inside himself, then a lot of people have been wasting a lot of time doing a lot of things other than writing.” The organizer of the unexpectedly popular National Novel Writing Month, which encourages amateur Dostoyevskys everywhere to crank out a full-length work in just 30 days, has a new treatise to promote, focusing on – you guessed it – “a pragmatic, populist approach to fiction writing.” Can great art actually result from this? Maybe not, but the point isn’t perfection, it’s encouraging the creative process in a society which has increasingly discarded it.