On the 6th of October, Tuesday, this week, Michael C. Milligan (a.k.a MCM) will be attempting to write a novel in 3 days, online, in front a live audience. The name of the novel he will be writing is Typhoon. Typhoon will have 51 chapters. That number is exact. Each one of those chapters will average 1500 words, making for a total word-count of 76500 by the end of this writing experiment, which should conclude at 6am in the morning, on a Thursday 72 hours after he begins writing. Michael will take 4 hours off each day for sleep. He will attempt to write a chapter an hour.

All of us who know him think he’s quite crazy.

My name is Eli James. I am not Michael C. Milligan, and I do not dare imagine the amount of work he has done in preparation for this event. Unlike Michael, I have not written fiction for about a year. (I have no idea why I just told you that). Here at The Dispatch, I will be liveblogging this experiment, taking time off only to attend to random real-life things. Michael himself will be posting short posts – mostly pictures, bless him – and will be tweeting throughout the 72 hours of this writing experiment. Some of us intend to make him do silly faces.

2. Why a novel in 72 hours is hard

Just so we’re clear on this: writing a novel is no mean feat. George Orwell worked on 1984 in frail health and in the bitter cold of winter, his publisher adamant that he complete the final draft of the novel before the end of the year, and so he did: with his typewriter in bed, thermostat turned on high, with cups of tea and coffee, sick in his lungs, and so died shortly after. Stephen King, the king of pop horror, describes writing fiction – and in particular long works of fiction – difficult and lonely to do: ‘like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub’. (He also believes in the healing properties of writing, but that’s another story for another day). David Foster Wallace, wunderkind of the 21st century litos-sphere, hung himself late last year in the middle of writing his third book. And on and on the list goes: writers who got drunk and smoked weed in the last years of their life, writing on tissue paper; writers who bemoan the act of writing the novel, writers who die tragically, writers who churn out 350 words a day, everyday, regardless of the circumstance, like a marathon runner focusing on only the next step in the sharp turn towards the inevitable.

Depressed now? Good. I’m just checking … but checking to make sure you understand the difficulties of writing a novel under even normal circumstances. Writing is lonely. It is tiring. It requires a level of mental concentration not unlike that of doing a series of sums in your head for an extended period of time, and even that is easier: sums need no creativity. MCM is taking this to an extreme, and he faces a very real threat of writing-fatigue in the long hours he will spend doing Typhoon.

He will also be having a hell lot of fun.

MCM writes thrillers. They’re fast-paced, quick, and rather violent-dirty things, and they keep the reader guessing right through the very end. It’s the one genre that lends itself readily to the idea of fly-by-night writing, especially one that will be done in front of a live audience. Michael will be tweeting questions at the end of each chapter (hashtag: #3D1D), enabling readers to change the story in ways that will both challenge and surprise even him, and he plans to take a picture of himself on a per hour basis, to allow us a glimpse of his eventual decline into insanity. (I’m kidding, of course) His wife and kids won’t be minding him. Which leads us to the question: if you’re writing a novel a chapter an hour, every hour for 72 consecutive hours, with very little breaks in between – how exactly do you do it?

3. How?

Here’s where things are interesting: Michael has, over the past few days or so, prepared an outline for the novel he’s going to write. He isn’t particularly worried about this aspect, at least: the last time I talked to him he seemed rather relaxed about the story, and was about to turn in for bed with a light migraine. We’re separated by 15 hours, and on my Mac dashboard I now have two clocks: one for Malaysian time, and another for Canadian. No guesses for which clock belongs to whom.

The idea for Typhoon’s story began in 2001, and was originally planned for use in a TV serial. Things didn’t work out, and the story sat out the good part of 8 years being reworked and retuned in a tool-shed in MCM’s head. He switched characters, added new storylines, and smoothed out the flow of events, over and over and over again. I asked him if he might break down, mid-way through the 72 hours, and begin doubting the direction of the story, and Michael didn’t even blink: “Doubt would be when I worry it’s all stupid and wish I hadn’t started.” He’s terrified of the experiment, but on the story he’s absolutely sure he cannot fail.

The one element in this project that has me worried is the degree of interactivity Michael’s building into Typhoon. The one question he asks every hour actually does affect the storyline in small but strange ways, things like ‘Should she take the train, or ride a bus?’ in an escape from the villain would matter for at least the next three chapters. MCM says that he’s compensated for these reader-generated variations in his plot outline, and that he’s prepared to ‘have fun’ with whatever his readers may throw his way. I wasn’t quite sure myself – to me, this was an unnecessary risk, like the tightrope artist who insists on walking without a safety line, or the tennis superstar who – out of deference to his father – plans on using a wooden racquet for the Wimbledon finals, after a tournament of playing with carbonite heads.

But Michael has done something like this in the past – once a week, every week, he writes a short story around whatever topic his readers throw his way. This is what’s known as a ‘topic tag’ over at his site, and he’s already done a few such stories. All of them are written on the fly, all of them are taken from his followers on Twitter, and all of them are rather long for such on-the-fly fiction.

The only other problem I can think up for such interaction would be possibility of contradiction: the kind of thing where you have a character saying she’s poor in the first chapter, and then driving off in a Ferrari in the tenth, and Michael’s got that worked out, too: “I know where the start and finish are, and I keep it in my head as I go. (And) really, when I wrote Rollbots, there were key points that needed to stay static, and others that could shift … I just learned to shift without losing the static stuff.”

And if reader-control led his characters to a place he never expected? “There are some things in this world that can’t be changed by individual actions.” he says, “some things are beyond the characters’ control, so I just let the world push them back on track.”

And a caveat:

“But hopefully I won’t need to.”

3D1D, or Typhoon, begins 6am Tuesday, UTC-7. Join us on The Dispatch as we follow MCM on this crazy-assed experiment, one chapter at a time.