Last week I experienced a chilling illustration of the phrase “No publicity is bad publicity”. I was reading about how David Nicholls, author of One Day, which, back in 2010, peppered many a British-holidaymaker-strewn poolside (making those poolsides deliciously seasoned with accessible fiction – it’s fine, I’m on top of this), and was subsequently made into a successful film starring that thin actress, you know the one. OK, I realise that hardly narrows down the options – they’re narrowed down by the demands and constraints of a body-image-obsessed patriarchy, which insists they have no dinner. But yes, there are lots of thin actresses. But this one’s really thin. Come on, you remember – she had that award-winning haircut in the miserable musical, same name as Shakespeare’s wife. Something to do with a cottage. I’d Google her if I had time. Anyway, she’s in it.

I feel I’ve left a sentence open somewhere there – a dangling demi-clause (as when the Christmas float sped under the low bridge). Yes! That’s it: David Nicholls was explaining to the Cheltenham literature festival why there was such a long gap between One Day and his latest novel, Us. Which wasn’t that he refused to rush his new novel – it was that he didn’t. Refuse to, that is. He did rush it, is what I’m saying. What he specifically did was download a piece of software called Write or Die that requires you to bang the words out at a certain rate or it starts deleting them. Nicholls described it as like “writing with a gun to my head”. It enabled him quickly to generate 35,000 unusable words. That’s enough for another series of Top Gear.

It sounds like a nightmare. Even though most writers have chosen their careers and, if they make a living, feel privileged to do so, the writing itself can be like a glowering, unapproachable chore. A post-party student flat’s worth of washing up. Much pacing and procrastination is required as part of the process. But an app that converts it into a self-undoing chore if you don’t get on with it must be the work of Satan.

It’s like washing-up that breeds, a tax return that turns into two tax returns if you don’t fill it in today, a lawn that, if unmowed, reverts to the crown from which you then have to buy it back. Or an ungrouted bathroom wall that if… Actually, I suppose DIY already is like that – if you don’t fix the dripping pipe or leaky roof now, the problem becomes bigger. A stitch in time saves nine. Et tu, sewing!? I always suspected there was something diabolical about it.

So why, having heard all that, would I suddenly start using this software? Which I am doing, in case you hadn’t guessed – maybe you hadn’t. Maybe “et tu, sewing” struck you as my trademark crap. Maybe everything I write is this slapdash but usually it takes me all day. That “usually” was a risk, I can tell you. It usually takes me a moment or two to remember how to spell usually and that’s time I can usually afford but not today – all that just cost me a paragraph. It was a cracker – wish I could remember it.

I’m writing at breakneck speed while being pursued by a terrifying invisible assailant. It’s like the bit in The Day After Tomorrow where they have to run away from waves of super-freezing air and get as near as possible to a brazier before it catches up with them. And if you want a better simile than that, you’ll have to ask someone who isn’t in the grip of the process it’s alluding to. And ditto if you don’t like sentences ending in prepositions. Or containing “ditto”. This is fraught.

The answer to the question I vaguely remember recently posing (but daren’t look back to check in case everything in between gets destroyed) is, like I said at the start before my hair went white, that no publicity is bad publicity. It’s like the photos of horrendous facelifts that still drive an upturn in the cosmetic surgery business. Or someone saying “Don’t touch that – it’s hot!” Or Facebook. It’s what killed the cat. I noticed something being mentioned, so I thought I’d give it a go, despite not having heard well of it. I think I’m beginning to understand why there’s a drugs crisis.

I’ll leave it to the sub-editor to take that last paragraph out of caps.

Apart from a sudden realisation of how Downton Abbey must get written, what am I going to take away from this experience other than my fee and a first official warning? Well, I can totally see why it doesn’t work for novel-writing. There’s no time to leaf back and remind yourself what the characters are called – which must be a key part of novel-writing, if novel-reading is anything by which to go (I’m getting the hang of this). The first draft would be packed with references to “Thingy” and “You know, the tall one who did the murder – whoops!”

It’s all very forward-moving, like talking. Like a phone call rather than an email. If you realise you missed something out, you can only chuck it in late – you can’t go back and make “happy birthday” the first thing you said. You have to correct earlier omissions with later inclusions – or, alternatively, just go with the flow, correcting nothing and being swept along in the direction of whatever you seem to be saying.

I’m beginning to suspect that a lot of newspaper columns get written like this. It explains both the terrifying rhetorical certainty of the barnstorming tabloid opinion piece – unwavering in its diatribe against toffs, scroungers, immigrants or career women – and the unashamed meandering of the colour supplement navel-gazer – “On Tuesday, I was popping to the shops and the car wouldn’t initially start and I thought, ‘There’s an anecdote in this!’ but then it did start so never mind…”

Perhaps Write or Die is based on a secret Fleet Street contraption of the Victorian era – a sort of treadmill typewriter that required you to type at a certain speed or become ensnared in the printing machinery. The first “red tops” may have been so coloured by the blood of leader-writers who vacillated.