X20 (A Novel of Not Smoking) 1996

I used to love cigarettes. Really love them. Lived for them. It wasn’t so much the tar and the nicotine; it was the addiction which was killing me.

Desire, risk, repression, denial. A story about a man giving up smoking offered access to all this and more.  Influenced by the ideas of the OuLiPo (for good intro and links see www.ualberta.ca/~stefan/Oulipo/en.html), I wanted the novel to share the same patterns as the inside of a smoker’s mind. Even stranger, the mind of a smoker in the process of kicking the habit.

To achieve this, I devised an OuLiPian system of structural constraints which determine both the mood and the plot of the story.

The novel follows the first 20 days of Gregory Simpson’s attempt to give up cigarettes after smoking 20- a- day for ten years. Every time he craves a cigarette, he occupies his hands by writing something down instead. The first chapter, the first day, has twenty separate sections of writing.

As Gregory’s cravings decrease, so do the number of times he needs to write something down. On the second day, the second chapter, he only thinks of smoking nineteen times, and writes nineteen sections. On the third day, eighteen, and so on. By the twentieth day, the final chapter of the novel, Gregory only craves a cigarette once in the day, and has only one final section to write to complete his story of (not) smoking.

Because he only writes when he wants a cigarette, everything Gregory writes down has something to do with smoking. The novel therefore recounts the story of his smoking life, and cigarettes turn out to have featured centrally at every significant moment.

(Throughout the book there’s also a number plot, designed around the fetish number 20. For this in more detail, see www.oulipocompendium.com).

The various structural constraints generate the text and form the novel, just as the constraint of nicotine addiction determines the life of a smoker (those snatched moments outside the office, the dilemma of time spent with children).

Oh, I should probably also mention that the story which emerges is full of love, intrigue, and excitement.

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