The novelist is so special.

"For all of November, Gabriela Denise Frank is writing a novel while sitting on a couch in a living room carved out of the third floor of the Central Library downtown in an installation titled 'A Novel Performance.'"

Boxed in by a set of stanchions, Frank sits on a couch, typing on a laptop and occasionally referring to the sheaf of papers spread all around her. Above her head is a large screen displaying everything she types into her document. Aside from that one outward-facing element, it’s a homey setup with a lamp, an ottoman, a tasteful rug, and an end table decorated with a pot of bright orange flowers. Despite the large white headphones she’s wearing—parts of the novel have been written to Yo Yo Ma tracks—library patrons want to intrude, to ask her what the hell she’s doing there. One woman looked at the setup and asked Frank, outright, "why are you so special?"....

Frank says the [National Novel Writing Month] process “feels very brutalist to me.” She describes the experience in a monotone, “Sentence. Sentence. Sentence. You write for three hours. You go to bed. You get up. You go to work. You come here and write for three hours. You can’t stop.”...

Writing in public is making her a different writer, too. Frank was writing “a romantic scene,” as people were standing at the stanchions, reading the draft as it appeared right over her head. She says “if I was at home, I’d be writing all kinds of stuff, but I had to edit.” At home, she went back into the draft and added sexier language, but as she was writing it under observation, “I couldn’t use that language in front of strange people.”

Strange people... and special people... What would you write if strangers were looking over your shoulder continually? I'd be tempted to start saying things about them, describing them, attributing rude thoughts to them, seeing how long it took them to notice, writing about how long it's taking them to notice, purporting to know their thoughts at the point when they notice, getting them to laugh. The people "want to intrude," we are told. Don't resist! Make it a 2-way process.