Excerpt from ET TU, BABE (by Mark Leyner)

I had once intended to write an entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I'm writing about a character who's in a Ph.D. program and I don't have to urinate badly, I'll have him do a regular three- or four-year program. But if I'm writing a novel and I have to urinate very badly, then I'll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year.