Three weeks written, alone in a mountain cabin

During week one I come to the conclusion that writing a book is basically confronting a problem the writer believes needs to be solved. I take strange comfort in other people's writing, looking through the green notebook I keep for words that might help me locate the problem in the first place and send me on the way toward resolution. "Your mind is constantly capable of surprising you if you work it hard enough" (Donald Barthleme). "Who shall say I am not/the happy genius of my household?" (WC Williams). There's a woman too, the Italian actress, who said she didn't dare look at the ocean for very long for fear she'd lose interest in the earth (I think it's Monica Vitti, but don't have the resources to verify), loving the statement so much I write it out in longhand to see how beautiful it is on the page and how little sense it really makes once I start thinking about it.

I spend the second week identifying the problem, the problem specific to the book I am writing, a book about a man trying to write a novel on a typewriter. The problem is that the man prefers being horizontal to being vertical, inaction to action, the sleep state to the waking state, and so on. The poor writer persists, however, by lying on his back, balancing the typewriter--a small, portable German model--on his knees as he writes his novel.

Then a second problem arises, a problem much greater than the first problem! Eveything the writer writes on the typewriter comes out as poetry instead of prose, and the novel about a man writing a novel on a typewriter is thrown into a profound quandary.

Now the question becomes: what to do with the third week?

The third week is spent walking up and down the cabin walls with the first two problems strapped to my back, knowing there's something worthwhile in both of them but not knowing how to proceed.