Word on the street Schtick Lit

What it means:You want to write a book, but you need a novel idea. Your life is dull – can't write about that. You're not an expert in any field, so you can't impart your wisdom in that regard. So why not do something off the wall, like spending a year living in a skip, or traversing Europe in a trolley? The resulting "immersive memoir" could be a bestseller, depending on how zany your idea is. It's known as schtick lit – doing something wacky with the purpose of writing a book about it.

The current king of schtick lit is AJ Jacobs, who has written The Know-It-All, in which he reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and The Year of Living Biblically, in which he sticks rigidly to the rules of the Bible – with hilarious results.

Where it comes from: Schtick lit is nothing new, although you can blame Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence for kickstarting the modern schtick-lit movement. Now it's no longer enough to travel somewhere interesting – you have to be lugging a fridge, as Tony Hawks did in Round Ireland with a Fridge, or going by donkey, as Robert Louis Stevenson did in his classic Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. More recently, Tim Moore did the donkey thing, which raises a problem: what happens when people run out of wacky ideas?

How to say it: "I'm working on my new book – trying to spend a year reading schtick lit without gouging my eyes out."

Kevin Courtney