LAST WEEK, two students at St John’s College set themselves the challenge of writing a novel in 24 hours between 12th and 13th January.
In a conversation about their university bucket lists, the two third-year students, Pascoe Foxell and Yves Weissenberger, decided they wanted to have written a novel before leaving Oxford. Foxell told Cherwell, “[the conversation] overlapped with a separate conversation on writing. Then we asked, ‘How long would it take to sit down and write a novel?’”
Foxell and Weissenberger agreed on some conditions for the 24 hour challenge. Each contestant had to devote 40 minutes of every hour to writing, and had to stay away from the internet in the first 12 hours. The two paid a 30 pound deposit each at the start, to be donated to a charity of choice in the event of a withdrawal from the competition. The pair were relieved by friends for an hour.
After the challenge, Foxell commented “I couldn’t tell if I wrote a really long short story, or a really short novel. Right at the end, when I was tying it all up and making it conclude in a good way, I was saying ‘fuck you’ to my earlier self who had written all that unconnected bullshit.”
Weissenberger described the unexpectedness of the writing process, “Sometimes the characters did something I didn’t know they were going to do. I had no idea how to move forward, and then a bartender uttered an unexpected command to my main character and I thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’”
He described his 20,000 word opus as about “a person who wakes up somewhere else every time he falls asleep. He has no idea if it is the same universe, because there is no reliable way to know how far away things are.” According to Foxell, “my piece of writing is about conspiracy theories, quite a bit, with detective stories mixed in, and lots of people transforming into other things, physically.”
Rachel Evans, a 3rd year psychologist from St John’s commented, “I’m thinking of including Pascoe and Yves as a case study of the creative process in my dissertation. This morning I went on the BBC website and found a story about a student who mooned some hell’s angels, threw a puppy at them, and escaped on a bulldozer. I wondered if Pascoe had infiltrated BBC News.”
