The Somewhat Ambitious

On the night of September 22, 1912, a certain Franz Kafka saddled up to his typewriter in what was surely a haze of narcotics, hallucinogens and over-the-counter glue* and after 12 short hours of literary labour gave ‘birth’ to his short story ‘The Judgment’. His words, not mine: “the story evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime.” Charming. I envy the woman who was provided the opportunity to give birth to his progeny. Lucky thing.

But perhaps you read this and say ‘Nay, Luke! I could never match such feats of literary efficiency. I have been writing for years and all I have to show for it is this semi-soiled napkin covered in the draft of last week’s shopping list’. To which I say ‘Is that napkin covered in gravy? I do quite like gravy.’ To which you say ‘Well, actually I have an entire bathtub full of gravy back here. If you’d like some’. To which I say ‘Really, a full bathtub? That’s… quite a lot of gravy. I… Do you think… Could we… frolic in it?’ To which you say ‘But of course, this gravy was made for frolicking! Grab a ladle and jump in!’ At which point I typically wake up in a cold sweat and realise I’ve just blogged about my gravy fetish in a public forum.^

Sexually charged gravy digressions aside (it’s just so… brown), I’ve always found that writing for pleasure/profit can be a difficult task in the absence of measurable deadlines. I mean, I can write the living God out of a 5000 word treatise on the role of memory in post-genocidal Rwandan communities when the thing is due at 5 pm the next day, but saddle me up with a recreational or non-assessable writing task and I will sit there emptily refreshing my Gmail rather than pen a paragraph.

Enter ‘Write or Die’, courtesy of the ominously named Dr Wicked. A nom de plume well deserved because Write or Die injects casual writing with the overtones of terror that it heretofore so sorely lacked. Basically you put in the number of words you want to write and the length of time for which you want to write, and then you choose between Forgiving, Strict and Evil grace periods, and Gentle, Normal and Kamikaze modes of punishment. And from there you start writing. But if you stop writing, then woe be unto you, because innumerable punishments shall be rained upon your head.. Well a fairly well-defined array of punishments at any rate. Gentle mode will lightly feather dust you with pop-ups. Normal mode will subject you to dreadful cacophonies such as the Devil’s Interval or Hanson (the Devil’s Interval of the pop age). And Kamikaze will start actively deleting your text. You stop writing, it starts deleting. Don’t fuck with Kamikaze mode. And then you get to the end, a weeping, sweating husk of a writer and realise you’ve just written 1000 words in half and hour. And in true Stockholm Syndrome fashion, you saddle up for another outing and set the bitch to Kamikaze. You’re mine Dr Wicked. You’re mine.

/Luke

P.S. Aside from the footnotes and links, written entirely at the whim of ‘Write or Die’… probably explains why I spend a 100-odd words talking about my gravy fetish.^

* Complete and utter conjecture
^ Fictional obviously… Although if you do happen to have a surplus of gravy sitting about, don’t hesitate to get in contact.