Jack Kerouac wrote his novel On the Road in the era of the typewriter. The trouble was that had a story to tell and didn’t want to be interrupted every five minutes to replace the sheet of paper.
His solution was to buy a roll of teletype paper, giving 120 feet of paper in a continuous scroll. That’s the equivalent length of approximately 123 sheets of A4. The novel was reportedly written in three weeks while his wife supplied him with coffee and Benzedrine.
The entire scroll was displayed at the British Museum in 2012. Had it been written today, he likely would have used a computer, robbing popular culture of this artefact.
I’m reminded of this stream-of-consciousness approach as I look at a Simplenote entry I’ve had for the past two weeks or so. Coming home from a poetry gig, I thought of a few lines of verse, adding a few more lines shortly afterwards. Then yesternight, I added a lot more lines, with only minimal editing.
In terms of plot structure, it’s very disjointed and I don’t intend to resolve this. I’m also satisfied with the opening lines and the closing lines, yet I feel it needs something more in the middle to bulk it up from the 23 lines it currently contains and I can’t tell yet what its final form is likely to be.
While it’s unlikely this short note will end up like On the Road, I do have one precedent for a project that grew out of all recognition. I started off writing a one-line gag about how we fictionally used to order YouTube videos by post. By the time I’d finished editing, it had ended up as a short story with more than 1,700 words.
Gavin Cameron 