Books written in record time

Writing a book means facing a world without rules, or at least an objective that lacks a single rule. It can be a natural and relatively easy process, but also a road full of obstacles, as slow as it is painful. An intricate game that always begins with a blank page or with a screen dominated by the monotonous blinking of the cursor.

And throughout that whole process, whatever it may be and whatever is written, perseverance, endurance, originality and solitude all come together — the great Murakami says that once you begin to write, the writer is alone and no one is going to come to their aid — along with the inexorable passing of time: the time of life and the time of writing. The Chilean writer Isabel Allende claimed that writing “is the only way to make the ephemeral eternal”. An eternity that may be the result of months and years of work — Marcel Proust took 14 years to write “In Search of Lost Time” — or the outcome of a single breath, the product of necessity, inspiration, excess or arrogance.

Here we are going to focus on the latter: works conceived in days or in just a few weeks, unforgettable and already part of the history of literature. This is a small sample of some of those novels that found the answer in time.

But first let us return to Murakami and his lapidary phrase: “To write a novel, whatever it may be, you have to read a great many books”; and to Javier Cercas: “Whoever does not read or write lives less”. So, dear readers and watch lovers, read and enjoy the passing of time among words.

“LA CELESTINA” – Fernando de Rojas (1499)

“Likewise they would think that I did not linger over finishing it for a mere fortnight of holiday, while my colleagues were away in their own lands, which is the truth; but rather for longer and with less pleasure…”. Fernando de Rojas confesses in the opening prologue that, once the first act had been sketched out, he completed one of the most important works in world literature in barely two weeks.

Were it not for “Don Quixote”, more than one critic has said, “La Celestina” would be the foremost work of our literature. On the threshold of the Golden Age, Fernando de Rojas’s piece is an unrivalled compendium of genres, themes, characters and styles, as well as a priceless portrait of a society and an era moving between cynicism, the passing of time, death and love. The power of love as the great misunderstanding of the age. 

“THE GAMBLER” – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866).

The brilliant Russian author wrote this tale in barely 26 days hounded by gambling debts and by the deadline of a contract imposed on him by the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, requiring him to write a novel by 1 November 1866. Should he fail to deliver, the publisher would keep the copyright to everything Dostoevsky wrote over the following nine years.

In record time, between 2 and 29 October of that year, the author dictated “The Gambler” — a semi-autobiographical novel — to the stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, whom he would marry just a few days later.

“THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE” – Robert L. Stevenson (1886)

Who has not heard of Dr Jekyll at some point? Who has not caught echoes of identity disorder? Who has not at some time felt drawn to human duality? Who has not fantasised about being someone else? Well, all of that and more is distilled into Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale, through which he conveys his own particular vision of the human condition.

A foggy, ghostly London provides the setting for a plot born of a nightmare Stevenson had, after spending weeks brooding on such matters. Feverish, agitated and weakened by a haemorrhage caused by his tuberculosis, he wrote the work in three days. The story goes that his wife, upon reading the manuscript, threw it into the fire, and Stevenson had to rewrite it over another three feverish days. Fortunately, this second version was saved from the flames.

“A STUDY IN SCARLET” – Arthur Conan Doyle (1887)

“A Study in Scarlet” is no ordinary novel. It is the work that launches the adventures and misadventures of one of the most emblematic characters in the entire history of world literature: Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in just three weeks. Alongside his inseparable Doctor Watson, his counterpoint, the most famous detective of all walks the streets of London to solve a crime full of false leads and unexpected twists.

“THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT” – Graham Greene (1939)

“This is a novel written in six weeks in 1938. It astonishes me to think that back then I could usually write a novel in nine months… but to do it in six weeks…”. That is how the Scottish author opened the prologue to “The Confidential Agent”, written in a time of trenches, straddling the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

And he did so while alternating it with the writing of “The Power and the Glory”, a book he suspected would not bring in enough money, which led him to set about creating — “as quickly as possible in the mornings” — this novel of entertainment and intrigue that provided enough to support his family.

“ON THE ROAD” – Jack Kerovac (1957)

Less than a month — exactly 21 days– is how long it took Kerovac to build what many consider the bible of the Beat Generation. The author spent seven years travelling across the United States, a frenetic experience full of dingy motels, excesses of every kind, lives lived on the edge and desolation, all of which form the backdrop to a work that reads as both a personal and a social chronicle.

To achieve that record time, Kerouac taped together sheets of teletype paper to form a continuous 36-metre roll that allowed him to type without stopping to change pages, thus achieving an uninterrupted, uncensored flow of writing. Some claim he wrote the work under the influence of a great many drugs, although the truth is that the author stayed awake thanks to the enormous quantities of coffee he drank. Incidentally, it took Kerouac six years to get it published. 

“A CLOCKWORK ORANGE” – Anthony Burgess (1962)

Briton Anthony Burgess — who had been wrongly diagnosed with terminal cancer — admitted to having written it in barely three weeks, motivated solely by money and by a strong desire to prove that he could rapidly create an innovative novel.

The dark, raw dystopia of “A Clockwork Orange” is in fact a plea for freedom and for the wonderful possibility of choosing between good and evil. It is therefore a worthy successor to the British dystopian tradition and to works such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”.

The novel enjoyed great success, although this was partly eclipsed by the film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick, released in 1971.

“THE RUNNING MAN” – Stephen King (1982)

“The Running Man” was written in one week and, as King himself acknowledged, it is “… a book written by a young man who was angry, energetic and obsessed with the art and craft of writing”.

The novel is set in the year 2025 in a dystopian United States — again, the dystopian element — with an authoritarian government where television is the only reality. More specifically, a television game show that breaks audience records and whose main attraction is the death of the contestants. Does that ring a bell?

“THE REMAINS OF THE DAY” – Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Ishiguro wrote this moving story in a little under four weeks following a carefully planned work schedule and isolating himself from the world.

The result was a masterpiece, a wonderful novel in which a butler, devoted body and soul to an English lord, reflects on the high price paid for such devotion. In reality, the novel delves into the value of lost time, the irretrievable past, the repression of desires and the denial of feelings.

“The Remains of the Day” was brought to the screen by James Ivory in 1993. The performances of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are unforgettable.

“THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS” – John Boyne (2006)

Irish novelist John Boyne admitted that he wrote a first draft of the work in the record time of two and a half days, barely stopping to eat or sleep. His writing flowed from the very first moment and the story absorbed him so completely that it compelled him not to stop — something unheard of for an author who acknowledged needing many months to build the rest of his novels.

The work, a dramatic fiction of the Holocaust set in the Auschwitz concentration camp, has sold millions of copies worldwide and reached number one on The New York Times bestseller lists. The United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland… the novel, not without a degree of controversy, became a best seller watchmaking.