A week ago, I boarded a British Airways flight from Rome to New York (which included a harried transfer at London Heathrow). While on board, I opened up my notebook and began to write a new short story. When I say notebook, I mean the kind with paper inside and not microchips. When I say write, I mean write, not type. I've always written my first drafts by hand... until now.
Getting the pen to move across the paper was like pushing it through sludge. The words refused to suggest themselves. Characters refused to speak. The rooms they moved in remained featureless, unfurnished blank cubes without traces of human contact. I finally had to give it up.
For years, the only way I've been able to start a project has been with pen and paper. (It also makes for a handy parlor trick to pull out of my hat at readings. "You've written an entire book BY HAND?") But I wasn't doing it to impress anyone. It was the way I began writing as a kid, before computers were widely available. It felt natural to be able to flip back and forth through pages, to scribble notes to myself in the margins or on the back of the page. It felt satisfying to scratch, scratch, scratch through a sentence or paragraph that doesn't work, or to scribble in a brilliant new insight across the white space on the top.
Writing by hand also forced me to re-evaluate what I'm working on word by word as I type what I've written into my computer. It created a necessary extra step that gave me a second chance to consider my choices. Did I really believe deep down in that metaphor? Would a character from Georgia really speak like a princess born in London? Was this inside reference to my favorite Jane Austen novel worth an extra sentence that bogged down my forward narrative drive?
I've been a true believer on the subject of writing by hand for so long that now as I try to continue the habit, I'm all the more surprised by my failure. The trouble began with my novel, which I've written twice by hand, once a couple of years ago, and again all last fall in Rome. When I was dissatisfied with the results, I just couldn't face the idea of opening a notebook and starting at page one once more. Instead, I turned on my computer and began to type. My fingers flew. I didn't focus on getting scenes right word by word. I threw in details of setting and physical description when I felt like it, but didn't stop to worry over them. Instead I homed in on action and moved forward through time with each sentence. The characters seemed to dance across the screen, and all I had to do was keep up with them. After a month, I had a glistening new novel instead of the lumpy mess I'd been trying to polish without success for so long.
Recently, as I tried to begin a new story on paper, I experienced the same frustration. Somehow writing each word felt too slow for me. But when I turned on my computer, I felt liberated. Scenes, characters, settings could all be fleshed out later. The main thing was to race to the end, and to go back and fill in shadings later. The new approach worked like a dream. Within a week, I had my story.
I'm not convinced that this rejuvination I feel from working on a computer rather than with pen and paper has much to do with the physical properties of either medium. It's probably making a change for change's sake that helped me more than the nature of that change. If I were a writer who preferred to work afternoons and had decided to swtich to mornings, it might have done just as well. The important thing is to shake things up, not rely on what's worked in the past.
The same goes for the content of the work itself. In my previous work, I explored stable codes of behavior associated with Judaism or American middle class life. In the work I'm doing now, I'm beginning to consider more personal, completely invented codes of behavior that shift from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, plunging characters who believe themselves to be rational into life-shaking confusion. The results are thrillingly and achingly alive. More importantly, they present me with new problems to solve, new people to get to know, new questions to ask my readers who like me are trying to make sense of a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos.
2 comments:
It was often said about the late Canadian writer Robertson Davies that he wrote by hand, with a quill. He wore a cape, what's wrong with the quill? I find writing by hand inhibits a natural, sometimes breakneck speed of words I want to commit to paper or the computer screen. Cutting and pasting is so much easier to accomplish on the computer. I do believe that editing should be done from a hard copy, so at least you can see before you what you've written.
Every story suggests it's own media. I write on a small, lightweight (under 2 lbs.) laptop because my day job requires me to travel. I've also learned not to edit until I'm done (something that is all too easy on a computer). Editing before the time is right can paralyze and stop all forward motion. Sometimes, though, writing by hand, will help me push through a difficult spot. It will slow me down when I need slowing down. In short, whatever works.
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