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Category Archives: Books

Pages of an Obsessive Diarist

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Posted on December 6, 2006 – 10:48

For almost 17 years from 1972, Reverend Robert Shields of Washington, USA kept an almost constant diary of everything he did. He wrote 35 million words before he was stopped by a stroke. His diary is thought to be the longest in existence.

This diary, of a man who only slept for two hours at a time in order to write about his every dream, has now been passed to the Washington State University to care for. You can read an excerpt from an interview with Shields and radio documentary maker David Isay here. Choice quotes include:

Robert Shields records everything he eats. He records his blood pressure and pulse at various times during the day, the temperature outside and in, every conversation he has, every piece of junk mail he receives. He sleeps no more than two hours at a time so that he can record his dreams. Robert Shields has also scotch-taped a variety of his life’s keepsakes into this diary. For instance: samples of his nasal hair.

The entire day is accounted for. I don’t leave anything out. I start in at midnight and go through the next midnight, and every five minutes is accounted for:
12:20 to 12:25: I stripped to my thermals. I always do that.
12:25 to 12:30: I discharged urine.
12:30 to 12:50: I ate leftover salmon — Alaska red salmon by Bumblebee, about seven ounces — drank ten ounces of orange juice while I read the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

I have the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations! Let’s hope I don’t start a diary!

A full page of his diary is available here.

(Found on Boing Boing)

As for David Isay, he’s currently working on the “StoryCorps” project:”It’s actually a very simple idea,” said Isay, explaining how the project works. “You bring your mother, your grandmother, anyone you want to our booth. You go in the booth, and the door shuts, and it’s kind of this magical sacred space. For 40 minutes you sit across the table, and you talk about the big questions in life. At the end of the 40 minutes, the CDs stop rolling and one goes to you and the second stays with us and becomes part of the archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.” [link]

Who would you take in there and what would you say?

The Great Frantic Novel

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Posted on October 31, 2006 – 12:43

I’m sitting here going over a 500 word document that I wrote almost exactly five months ago. It’s the first chapter in a novel I started to write but gave up on. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel (you could say it’s a Gonzo novel) but artistic licence has obviously been taken in certain instances. I enjoyed writing it but that joy only lasted a couple of days until I because a bit busier in work and at home.

Today I visited http://www.nanowrimo.org/ – the webpage for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo!). To quote them, it’s “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing”.

The idea is that between November 1st and November 30th, members write a novel – defined as 175 pages or 50,000 words. During the month there are regular newsletters and meet-ups with fellow members (Wrimos) to offer encouragement and to discuss ideas. There is also one final meet where, to quote again, “the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children” are undertaken.

Sounds like fun to me!

As you can imagine, a cluster of random people brought together with the idea of writing a great novel is undoubtedly going to result in pages upon pages of drivel. That is the genius of NaNoWriMo! The whole principle is to produce a novel with a “kamikaze approach”: lowering your own expectations and taking risks to complete something where the completion is more important than the quality of the end-product. To not get scared away by the time and effort required, the determination and meticulous ability – not to mention the continual fine-tuning and editing processes.

Affiliates are given permission to encouraged to make mistakes and to just create – “to build without tearing down”. “[To start] the month as mechanics, out-of-work actors and teachers [and to] walk away novelists.”

Us Wrimos (I’m one of them now!) write without having to obsess over quality. We will be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties and will be able to mock ‘real novelists’ who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.Come on… let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.