Speed-writing author dashes off a gritty tale
Chalk by Doug Diaczuk Anvil Press
Doug Diaczuk’s novel is the 36th winner of the annual “three-day novel writing” contest begun in Vancouver in 1977. Organized by Geist, one of Canada’s leading literary magazines, it now attracts entries from all over the world. While we should all admire the spirit of this competition, challenging the armchair writer and testing the commitment of the would-be professional, there’s no doubt this is a big ask. After all, crafting novels shares little with the spirit of professional sports or live music, where spectators thrill to the abilities of those who dedicate themselves to public performance; the solitary craft of the novelist, or the pleasure of reading, are very different things to arena rock and soccer stadiums. Many readers place more value on a novelist’s attention to detail and accuracy than on their speed and volume of output. With this kind of competition, there’s a risk that writers end up getting praised for being the fast food of scribbling, able to churn out tens of thousands of words a day of somewhat less than nutritious fare. Of course it’s possible to create works of genius at lightning speed; poet John Keats wrote the immortal Ode to a Nightingale in a matter of hours one afternoon in London, and Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in less than six months.
Leaving such sublime talents aside, most writers would acknowledge some benefit in drafting and reviewing their work, and Doug Diaczuk is probably among them. In the first place, we should tip our hat to Diaczuk for having written 47,000 words in three days, or more than 15,000 words a day — a level of output of which Sovietera miners would be proud. For the most part Diaczuk has wisely chosen to keep things simple, writing in the present continuous and keeping his sentence structures taut and punchy. There are some ingenious ideas in Chalk which no doubt helped his manuscript to stand out, including addressing the reader as his protagonist, “you,” a device that instantly draws us in to his story; and the recurring motif of chalk itself, used variously by police to mark out dead bodies in a suicide, by children drawing flowers, and by Diaczuk’s protagonist for communication with others in an otherwise alienating society.
The book’s central conceit, that modern society is injurious to human relationships and honest communication, is well expressed. The use of chalk drawing as a motif for the difficulties of emotional honesty is effective, especially at the very end of the work, where rain threatens to blur and erase any attempt at expression through the drawings. Pulling the reader in, the immediacy of Diaczuk’s narrative is compelling and stands out alongside some of his stylistic inventions as the best thing about this book, gritty realism running against the desire for connection, the failure to understand and communicate at odds with the need for self-expression.
Diaczuk’s handling of his characters is more problematic, however, and it’s this aspect of this novel that would undoubtedly have benefited from more time and care. It’s not clear whether Diaczuk’s protagonist suffers from a bizarre combination of Asperger’s syndrome and Tourette’s, or whether they are simply very unlikeable. Diaczuk wants to convey alienation and a sense of detachment, but succeeds only in communicating a peculiar vicious rudeness. Here, the use of “you” to describe the main character works against Diaczuk, as it’s hard to offer external clues about character using this viewpoint. Likewise, the deliberate lack of clarity about the gender of “L,” whom we subsequently learn is a girl named Lisa, looks like a mistake until it becomes clear this is another stylistic device designed to make us unsure about L’s true gender.
Well-conceived and with some clever turns of style, Chalk is an interesting read, even if its central character is an unsympathetic figure and some of the other characters are less well drawn than might be hoped. If there are times when the constraints of writing a novel in three days read like the equivalent of listening to a musician practising, mistakes and all, then one can’t help but wonder what Doug Diaczuk might produce if given more time.