The three-week novel

I set myself the task of writing a novel in three weeks. I had a schedule all worked out at great length, and had already marked out the days on the calendar and laboriously prepared. This schedule would involve me sitting at my desk at every spare moment I got, all day every day, twenty-four seven, and writing exhaustively. 

The project I had in mind was vast, no less than a huge epic poem explaining the whole scenario of life to myself, all the problems of youth, of life in the twenty-first century.

I wanted to take every element of this and extend on it, make it lasting. I always had about three or four such novels and large poems on the go at any one time, and I had grand delusions about the depth and scope of my works in progress. In those days I very  much tended to write quickly and exhaustively til I had finished. I found out in this way the terrible feeling of uphill struggle one has to face when contemplating writing any kind of large work, the long, lonely hours bitterly struggling with yourself in order to create, the endless days and weeks and months of creative turmoil with seemingly no end in sight. But I knew one thing clearly, and that was that to be a writer you have to write, and write unceasingly, every day of your life...

Alone at nights in bed misery descended on me. My thoughts were stripped to the bare bones of anguish, all pretension was lost. I saw myself and the world exactly as it was, foregoing all fantasy, lies, and escapism. In these moments I felt acutely the impossibility of fulfilment. I forced myself to face the facts, one by one, and put them to myself in the bitterest way I could. I stripped everything down to the plainest facts, the most harsh home-truths.

And upon waking, that's what I wanted my writing to be, infused with some of that truth. Everywhere I went I enthusiastically quoted the words of Jack Kerouac: "fiction is for kids". I wanted to look with brave eyes at the real world around me, and set it down truthfully on paper. I wanted to tackle the status quo, strip away the layers of appearance, contradict and twist everything I was told until I found the barest fundament, the rock of truth. This is dynamic realism in action, a negation of all current forms, a denial of everything, a reduction of the world to zero so that in that void may be found a new starting-point for new values, new perspectives, and a new, broader truth!