The current issue of The New Yorker includes an interesting piece on “Writers at Work”, describing an attempt to create three architect-designed writers’ “habitats” in Queens. The idea is that these “human terrarariums” would be places

into which writers would move for a month’s time as part of a “living installation” called “novel”. Three subjects relocated to the boxlike spaces about a week ago, and on June 4th they are expected to emerge with finished books.

This is the “million monkeys with typewriters” puzzle in another guise, adjusted to take into account the precarious nature of our ecosystem. Monkeys, you see, are everywhere endangered, while writers are a dime a dozen: shake any grimy garret and you’ll undoubtedly dislodge a clutch or two of scrawny novelists, wild-eyed and disheveled, each with their marked-up MSS and their alphabetized file-folder of rejection letters. It is their sheer ubiquity which makes novelists the perfect subjects for experiments such as those now taking place in Queens.

We at texts&pretexts want to applaud this pioneering effort, and are quite excited at the potential it suggests. We are witnessing a daring extension of the hot-house method of production, a process which has seen acres of fertile Fraser Valley farmland transformed to glassed-in growing environments. These industrial mini-Edens are responsible for the all-season cornucopia of hot-house tomatoes, the uniformly plump and flawlessly red peppers that are heaped in their hundreds at Granville Island Market produce stalls. Thanks to streamlined production methods we are the grateful beneficiaries of year-round bumper crops: why should we not expect the same yields from a novel farm?

The Queens experiment is a mere prototype of course, a “proof of concept”, but it doesn’t take a William Gibson (or a Douglas, for that matter) to see where it could lead: a steady supply of manuscripts with minimal investment, and healthy profits for all concerned. Let’s do the math: divide an acre of industrial land into palatial 300-square-foot writers’ habitats and the yield should be a reliable 50 novels (more or less) per month. Per month! Surely at least one of these would turn out to be a best-seller?

But before you cash in your savings bonds to invest in The Novel Farm™ IPO, we must voice a shred — just a smidgen — of concern: can we count on our novelists to cooperate? The New Yorker article describes the behaviour of Laurie Stone, one of the three initial writer/guinea pigs in Queens:

The rules forbid the participants to watch television or leave their boxes for more than ninety minutes a day, but, perhaps unwisely, they encourage a more contemporary method of wasting time: blogging. By day three, yoga was evidently not enough to keep Laurie Stone from going stir-crazy. She wandered out of her box and began cataloguing the items in the Flux Factory kitchen for her blog: “A 15-roll sack of Bounty paper towels. A five-pound plastic jug of honey with sticky cap. A 32-ounce bottle of red hot sauce. A two-quart vat of Kikkoman soy sauce. A crate of oranges…” A novel it was not.

So you can see why this must be rated a high-risk investment. If all our novelists were to go rogue on us and take to listing condiments on their blog, our nest-eggs would be scrambled in no time flat. For we can attest from painful first-hand experience that there is no more certain waste of time than writing for a blog.