4 insane acts of writing

Fun fact: All writers are crazy, to some degree. There is a reason for it — actually making it through a novel almost requires it. If you love to read, then you’re continually benefiting from other people’s craziness. But in all of the history of the written word, probably no one has topped the sheer insanity of the following people:
1. Writing a coded novel mocking the Nazis (while in a Nazi prison)
Hans Fallada is the all-time poster boy for writers who just didn’t care about the consequences. By the age of 50, he was a full-blown criminal lunatic, drifting in and out of prisons and insane asylums. He was a morphine addict, a womanizer and an alcoholic, all while being one of the most celebrated German authors of the 1930s and ‘40s. And true to his nature, while other artists were fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, Fallada stayed behind, despite openly despising the Nazis. How could he resist the urge to mess with one of the most murderous regimes in history?
So, in 1944, Fallada was put in a Nazi prison/asylum for the criminally insane for the attempted murder of his ex-wife (classic Hans). To obtain writing materials and to survive an incarceration that was generally seen as a death sentence, Fallada told Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels that he wanted to write an anti-Semitic novel. However, Fallada had no intention of doing any such thing.
What he actually wrote, under the guards’ watchful eyes and in constant fear of discovery, were three encrypted books in a single notebook so densely coded that they weren’t deciphered until long after his death.
One of these books was the much acclaimed The Drinker, a dark semi-autobiographical novel depicting addiction, crime and homosexuality in a way not quite in line with Nazi literary policy. Another book was a collection of children’s stories. Both books were written in tiny, condensed, almost indecipherable handwriting, but he kept the children’s stories visible, to give the guards something simple and nonthreatening to see should they question what he was up to. But in between the lines of the short stories, upside down and backward from the end to the beginning, he wrote a frank, extremely anti-Nazi memoir of his life under National Socialist rule, entitled In Meinem Fremden Land.
When he ran out of space, he turned the notebook around again and wrote even more miniature lines between the existing ones, resulting in 72 crisscrossing lines of writing per page. Had the Nazis found out about the contents of the notebook, Fallada would have been murdered. But his book of “children’s stories” fooled everyone.
Fallada managed to smuggle the manuscript out during a home visit, arranged under the false premise of picking up materials for the anti-Semitic project (because for some reason the Nazi prison in which he was incarcerated had anti-Semitic materials in short supply). In December 1944, as the Nazi regime began to crumble, Fallada was released from prison. Goebbels never received the anti-Semitic novel he had been promised, and Hans Fallada died three years later of a morphine overdose, having written three books (two of which were staunchly anti-Nazi) under guard of the Nazis themselves.
2. A diary the size of 500 novels
Robert Shields, a former minister and English teacher, holds the record for having kept the longest modern diary ever, at a mind-boggling 37.5 million words. To put that in perspective, the average novel is about 75,000 words long. So this was the size of about 500 of those.
How did somebody stretch a personal diary into something long enough to fill an entire bookcase? Well, for 25 years, from 1972 to 1997, he wrote down what he experienced every five minutes. He would spend four hours a day doing this, sometimes just checking and recording his vital signs.
There are also a disquieting number of entries that focus on the force and consistency of his bowel movements. He kept writing right up until he had a stroke and eventually died, and his journals were donated to Washington State University, presumably because his surviving family assumed every single page was haunted. Some gems include:
“7 a.m.: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.”
“7:05 a.m.: Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.”
“6:30-6:35 p.m.: I put in the oven two Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese at 350 degrees.”
“6:50-7:30 p.m.: I ate the Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and Cornelia ate the other one. Grace decided she didn’t want one.”
There are 37 million words of this.
3. Finnegans Wake: a completely unreadable masterpiece
James Joyce was one of the most influential writers of the early 20th century. His most famous work, Ulysses, was a version of Homer’s Odyssey, except that it took place in then-modern Dublin (even though most copies were seized and destroyed by American and English customs officers due to “obscenity”). For his last hurrah, Joyce tried to write the most difficult-to-read novel in history, because apparently he was afraid his existing works hadn’t fulfilled the quotient most artists seem to adhere to. By most accounts, he succeeded with a work called Finnegans Wake.
To give some background, the book took 17 years to write. Almost every sentence is painstakingly crafted to be a pun or double meaning. It’s so impossible to understand that you need guides to read it, while you’re reading it. He used different languages (including some that he invented), combined words together and purposefully made sure there were multiple layers of meaning in everything. Impossibly, it somehow has characters and a plot.
4. A novel typed entirely with one eyelid
Imagine you had to write a novel, but for some reason you couldn’t type or write. Like, say, your fingers didn’t work. OK, so you’d just hire somebody to type it, and tell them what to type, right? It’d take way longer, but it’s definitely doable. OK, now say you’ve lost your voice. Now what? You could use some kind of sign language to communicate with your typist, we guess. OK, now say that you can’t speak, and your entire body is paralyzed except for one single eyelid. Now what?
Those were the circumstances under which Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote his autobiography The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby, a former fashion-world powerhouse and editor for Elle magazine, woke up after a refreshing stroke-induced 20-day coma completely paralyzed except for his eyes, sort of like Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, except with a much more useless body part. In order to save him from getting an infection, his right eyelid was sewn shut soon afterward, leaving him with just his left eye as his only means of communication. This proved to be a near insurmountable challenge, because as you may already be aware, eyes cannot speak and can only hold pencils with great difficulty.
Yet, working with a speech therapist, Bauby managed to develop a method of communication based around blinking his one working eyelid. Once he had the basics down, he decided it was time to write a book about his experiences.
So, how did this work? Well, letters would be read aloud to him, and Bauby would blink that stalwart left eye of his when the letter he wanted to use was spoken. Then they’d write that letter down. The process would start all over again until a word was completed. Once they got good at it, he could usually get a word out in about two minutes. The final book, about 140 pages long, took Bauby an estimated 200,000 blinks to complete.
Even weirder, the book was good. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a critically acclaimed hit (which saved the publisher the incredible awkwardness of having to reject a book a dude wrote with one eyelid). Sadly, the author died mere days after its publication of complications from pneumonia. But his book became an international bestseller and was adapted into a movie 10 years later that received multiple Academy Award nominations.