The Videographer

Jason Rapczynski's The Videographer is an exciting story of a down and out film student turned porn movie cameraman.

No, let me rephrase that.

Actually, it’s a regular, routine story about young people in the digital age doing what young people have done through the ages.

Get drunk, fornicate furiously and have delusions of creativity.

What’s unique about the story is way in which it’s told. Rapczynski’s style is fast-paced and pulsating.

Reading Rapczynski's book is like watching a trailer of a Bruce Willis movie where the entire movie is encapsulated in a montage of quick changing images and snatches of one-liners.

It sort of gives you the complete picture but leaves you hungry for more.

Obviously, it’s a style that’s worked for Rapczynski because The Videographer is the winner of the 31^st 3-Day Novel contest.

That’s right, Rapcznski wrote the novel in three days during the Labour Day long weekend in 2008, along with thousands of other participants from across the world.

More than 400 of them actually succeeded in completing their novels in three days.

The two youngest entrants who competed with complete novels were 14-year-old Carson Taylor of Claremore, OK, and 10-year-old Natasha Carr-Harris of Vancouver, BC.

This is Rapcznski’s first novel. He’ll definitely write and publish more novels, but it’s unlikely that he’ll enjoy writing any of them as much as he enjoyed writing The Videographer.

I know what it feels like to be writing continuously for three days. I participated in this year’s (32nd) 3-Day Novel contest.

I successfully started and completed Plague; a love story set in the tumultuous years of the mid-1990s, at a time when India was rocked with communal riots, serial bomb blasts and an outbreak of plague.

It's impossible to describe the experience or replicate it.

Nothing can match the tense excitement of developing a story from scratch, navigating it through various stages of plot and ultimately guiding it to a denouement that gives the reader a sense of genuine, logical closure.

I wrote about the 3-Day Novel contest couple of weeks ago (Becoming a writer) when I had attended the contest's launch event in Toronto.

Image: http://www.3daynovel.com/