Ambitions. We all have our ambitions. Some want to be an astronaut. Some want to find a cure for cancer. Some want to become mumble-rapper. And some want to write the world’s longest book just for the shit and giggles.
I was the last one. So, almost four or five years ago, I had this rather terrible idea – to write the Big Book of Nothing (no, I didn’t see Sienfield, in fact, I watched it a few years after my attempt). And this book should be a collection of unrelated chapters about nothing. Kind of stream of consciousness. More or less what I’m doing now. But even less common sense (which is possible).
I’m not sure and don’t remember much, but I think the general idea was to write a book that would be 20 million words or something like that. The number may differ, but I think it was something like that. I did a whole Excel spreadsheet, made my calculations, and found out that it would take me a lot of time to accomplish that (yes, back then, I loved Excel and spreadsheets; it is a sort of professional deformation, took me some unhealthy amount of time to burn out and forsake it for good). But, me being me; I said fuck it, let’s do it. And started doing it. Should I say it took me a lot of time just to start? I wrote a lot of crap. A lot. By the time I crossed 100k words (the size of a solid novel), I was already lost.
Now, for you to understand what kind of masochist I am, I wrote every day for several thousand words (I don’t want to lie, but I believe it was around 5k words per day). Obviously, their quality was extremely low, and even I wasn’t ready for how bad it was going to be. But I kept going.
I made my own research and found that books this big were either AI-generated pieces or some crazy copy-paste cheat engine. Anyway, the majority of the longest books out there turned out to be true garbage, unreadable and boring. The only reason to buy any of them is to have fun if you’re into such kinds of things or really hate trees.
The longest books were public stunts, where authors (if they even could be called that) were trolls and too lazy to actually do anything for real, so they just generated some nonsense. One guy went further and just wrote something like the Story of Blah (I didn’t google it, I think the name is right). And you guessed it right, the book was just one word repeated over and over and over. Another guy just came up with an algorithm (I believe in Python) where it wrote itself. Once again – cheating, boring and lame. Shit for shit.
I didn’t want to be like that. No sir! I wanted to be the guy who wrote the longest book of nothing, which also would tell at least some story. Some thoughts. Some emotions. Convey it to some extent. And, the more I got into it, the more I understood one simple thing – maybe I’m illiterate by the writer’s standards, maybe I plain suck, but I can’t write without attaching. I can’t be the guy who writes to pull off some stunt. I write because I love what I do, and now, how can you love what you do and do it badly on purpose? That’s impossible, to be honest.
You have to have zero respect for your craft and for yourself. That’s where I gave up. Unfortunately, while I enjoy the idea of More is More, I’m strongly against doing it without heart and imagination. If you’re going to do something creatively stupid, at least do it the way you like and enjoy it. Maybe others will consider you an idiot, but well, at least you loved what you did, you had fun, and, what is most important, you were honest. You were honest with yourself, and that’s what matters the most.
So, yeah, basically, this gargantuan thing, this task of epic proportions, became too personal. I started writing stories from my life, stories from my past. Describe things that happened to me, were happening, and probably would happen. Share my experience and all that jazz. Holly shit, I wrote one chapter 10k words long about freaking progress. I… still… don’t… know… what I… did. I’m trying to recall what I wrote there, and to be honest, I’m not sure this thing would be good to share with people.
I still have this file stored somewhere. I wrote it in MacJournal. Back then, I bought my first Mac (2015 used MacBook Pro 15 inches, this shit was heavy and cool, and you could still upgrade the SSD, so I’m even somewhat sorry I sold it, but I think it’s in good hands now, at least this person uses it for photos or something like that so it’s alright, just like Jobs intended) and wanted to utilize all power of the Mac. Yeah, I was dumb and didn’t know one simple truth – multi-platform saves time, space and is a lifesaver. Well, now I know.