Writing as Performance Art might be counterintuitive but how about painting while drunk? Last year London’s Royal Academy featured a major exhibition of the 19^th century Japanese artist Kyōsai. And when it comes to showing artists you’ve never heard of the RA sure did pick a dilly. Imagine an anime version of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delight. Kyōsai gives us spidery characters with comical faces and poses, aristocrats with two-foot long noses, frog armies, geyser-like farts, and sexual hijinks more humorous and satirical than pornographic.

How did Kyōsai become so wild and uninhibited? Apparently he performed at shogakai parties. These were sake-infused painting demonstrations in which people paid to watch artists drinking sake, painting, drinking, painting, until the artists were so drunk they took off their clothes and let the models go home (maybe). “After a considerable intake of alcohol, Kyōsai’s sense of humor would have surely been emboldened and his performance wilder…” from Kyōsai by Sadamura Koto. In fact, Kyōsai was arrested when his artistic zeal cut a little too close to the bone in lampooning a government official.

Ever since that exhibition I’ve wondered whether writers could perform at a shogakai party. There’s storytellers and slam poets. Writers have been known to read their work. There’s a guy on the South Bank (of the Thames) who sits in front of an antique typewriter and advertises poems for a fee. But writing a story you’d put your name to and on the spot? Writing is usually a lonely endeavor, just you and that blank computer screen, except when you nod off and fill it with endless rows of D’s. For me it’s always D’s. Surely it should be Z’s.

A Picasso or a Kyōsai might be able to dash off a one-take sketch. Most writers are re-writers. Maybe there is some drama in watching entire swaths of prose being crossed out or highlighted and deleted. Otherwise, think of those old movies where letters appear on the screen accompanied by a background clack clack clack of a manual typewriter. Visually, writing is an endless p…r…o…c…e…s…s…i…o…n of letters and that gets old faster than last year’s candidate.

There’s a raft of writers who have perfected the drinking part. Most keep their drinking separate from their writing. Poe and Hemingway come to mind. William Faulkner is one writer who combined the two. Several editors went half-blind trying to turn Faulkner’s whiskey-driven scrawl into prose. And typing while drunk? I imagine a manual typewriter with a bunch of levers wedged together from pounding the wrong keys. (The QWERTY layout was designed to minimize such occurrences).

Absent the absinthe, if there is one writer who might have the confidence and the technique to brave a shogakai party it might be the thriller writer Lee Child. After all, Child invited another writer, Cambridge lecturer Andy Martin, to sit over his shoulder and watch as Child embarked on his twentieth novel, Make Me. Martin’s eventual book about witnessing the evolution of the novel is called Reacher Said Nothing. Jack Reacher is Child’s hero, a cross between Clint Eastwood’s man with no name and John D Macdonald’s Travis McGee. You cannot open a current version of any McGee novel without encountering Child’s foreword citing McGee as Reacher’s forerunner.

If Child were one of those thriller writers who elaborately outlines his novel before putting finger to key, Martin could have witnessed a lot of typing and coffee drinking. Child, however, is what is called in the biz a pantser, as in seat of the pants-er. When Child started Make Me all he had was that catchy title and a strong first sentence. So there is plenty of drama in watching the plot appear ex nihilo. 

Well, not exactly out of nothing. At the time of writing Make Me Child had nineteen Jack Reacher novels under his belt. Therefore, unless he works outside the box, he is starting with a well-developed protagonist in a generally spare environment (reducing the need for a lot of research) and a plot arc that must be close to instinctive by this point.

Another advantage for Child as a shogakai performer: he never rewrites. What he types is what you get. Of another writer who never revised, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote famously said, “that’s not writing, that’s typing.” It’s a variation on Robert Graves’s quote, “there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.” The implication: bad writing is not much more than typing.

A performance writer could not possibly handle many of the modern novels with their interweaved story lines and their flashbacks and flashforwards. Often the reader is so busy trying to figure out which characters are part of which story and how they may relate to other characters in the other stories—or is it in the same story?—that you lose track of which cup the bean is under.

Child’s Reacher novels, the few that I’ve read, are not like that. We follow Reacher, looking over his shoulder as he embarks on another mission much as Andy Martin looked over Child’s shoulder as he created the story.

Even if Child is the perfect choice for a public performance of novel-writing we haven’t dealt with the booze part of the challenge yet. Before we get to that please allow a side excursion to the future, one in which AI programs are capable of writing accomplished novels. This might not be as far away as you might think. Already programs like ChatGPT are getting passing grades on college level essays and abstracts. There’s been a welter of articles such as: Are robots taking over journalism? Will ChatGPT make lawyers ohsolete? It’s becoming increasingly possible to imagine getting fooled by an AI-written novel.

How can a historical fiction writer (as an example) compete with an AI platform that’s “read” and can synthesize plot details from every historical novel ever written plus all books, articles and documents pertaining to the relevant period?

And with due respect to Child his kind of spare, straight-ahead plot would be the first place an AI program might succeed. How could Child compete with a machine spewing out ten Reacher Further novels a day?

As Kyōsai might say, Computers cannot get fired up by a crowd; computers can’t get drunk.