KK: The speed is the most important thing. Both challenge the concept of form but the speed has a practical element as well for me because I am a perfectionist in my writing, in my way of thinking and I want to be clever and I want to make it into real art, real literature. But I had to fight against that thing in me because I became so critical of my own writing and I needed to get over that, and the only way I could do it was by speeding up because then you don’t have time to be critical at all.
It also allowed me to escape the notion of knowing what to write. If you know what you’re going to write then that’s death for me, then nothing is happening. If I plan something it’s just dead. And almost everything I write is dead in that sense really, but if I speed up then something, all of a sudden, is happening because I can no longer control it.
There’s also something else in there too. When I was nineteen I went to a creative writing course and we were basically taught that if something is bad then you should just take it away, essentially a very minimalistic approach to writing. It took me ten years to overcome that and to understand it’s possible to do the opposite, that if it’s bad you can just add more in because then something else is happening.
It’s the same thing with the length. If you write a hundred pages then it’s all about concentration, it’s all about sentences or language. But if you write 3600 pages the sentences are no longer the important thing, it is something else that is going on that’s difficult to explain.