As a doula, I see new parents who, while they’ll admit to knowing almost nothing about babies, are also filled with certainty. One couple’s infant is sleeping through the night. Another’s doesn’t sleep at all unless he’s in the Sobey’s produce section. Even though, at some level, they know better, both sets of parents are sure that this is the pattern that’s in place for the duration, be it soul-crushing or delightful. As a writing instructor, I see students who are just as certain: This is how I write. This is never going to change. Now, while the author may have more control over his or her writing process than the parent has over the small, squalling life form, I’ve been both, and there’s a common thread: Whether you’re smug or resigned, contented or anxious, you can’t get too comfortable, and you shouldn’t ever capitalize The Way Things Are.
Until 2011, I wrote longhand. When other writers found this out, many would make dismissive hand gestures, roll their eyes and say something like, “You’ll change that.” Still others would get defensive: “Please tell me you’re not one of those writers who think there’s some mystical bond between your hand and the paper.” To the first comment I’d say (defensively), “I really don’t think so—and anyway, it doesn’t matter how you write”; to the second, “No—it’s just a functional thing; it’s how I work best.” And it was, for years and years.
I could write anywhere; all I needed was a pen and a notebook, or a napkin, a coaster, a grocery receipt (most of my bursts of inspiration were conveniently brief). I chose my notebooks and pens with an almost fetishistic fervour that sort of belied my insistence on the lack of a mystical element to the process. I did some quiet gloating while writer friends crawled around under café tables, looking for power outlets. And this quiet gloating did some more belying. Yes, I wrote longhand, and yes, I did think it made me a little bit better and cooler than the other kids.
Some of these other kids didn’t simply write on laptops: they wrote OUT OF ORDER. One characteristic of my longhand process was its linearity. I couldn’t jump around in the narrative without requiring multiple books, or colour coding, tables of contents, explanatory notes that would end up being longer than the actual story. So I started at the beginning and stayed firmly on course, chronologically. This meant that I’d sometimes spend weeks or even months not writing, as I was trying to figure out what came next. There might be an image in my head—a moment that I knew would take place another fifty or hundred pages in—but I wouldn’t write it. Not allowed, according to Sweet’s Longhand Code.
Three years ago, I was struggling with a new idea, scribbling notes in a book that didn’t feel quite right (too big, with pages that ripped too easily away from the spiral binding). I’d retired my Pattern Scars pen (because, as every fetishistic longhander knows, each book requires a new pen), and none of the ones I was test-driving was doing it for me. At the same time, my ancient-in-technological-terms iMac, after displaying some increasingly strident warnings, was unable to do anything except turn on and off—and sometimes not even that.
So I got myself a MacBook Air, and everything changed. Not right away, mind you. At first I kept scribbling in the sub-par notebook, struggling with scenes that weren’t coming together. I typed some notes and saved them on my laptop. One “Writing Thursday” at the pub, I went from typing notes to typing a paragraph of actual story. It wasn’t terrible. I kept writing the scene longhand the next day and was irritated when it didn’t flow as I’d expected it to. I returned to the laptop. That scene was followed by another, and another. No way, I thought. Nope—this isn’t how I work. So how dare it be working?
I got stuck. Longhand didn’t help. The laptop didn’t help. Jump ahead, a new, seductive inner voice whispered. You know there’s going to be a scene in a cave, with Minos, Daedalus, Icarus, Ariadne…you can see it now. So write it now.
I did write it—it, and another couple of scenes that came well before and well after it. I typed these scenes and then spent nearly eight months filling in the ones that led to them, all aflutter that I was being so risqué, so heedless of what I’d always considered to be my modus operandi.
I’m writing the sequel now, entirely on my laptop, entirely out of sequence. I haven’t made a longhand note in months. I crawl around under café tables, looking for a power outlet, and I can’t believe that I’m doing this; meanwhile, I also can’t believe that I wrote a book entirely on the streetcar, in a series of Miquelrius notebooks, with a red plastic pen, blue ink, medium fine tip. Both processes seem mysterious (if not mystical). The transition from one to the other is humbling because I can’t really explain it. The fact that I can’t be sure that this latest phase will endure is both unsettling and exciting—kind of like that moment in the middle of the night when you’re awake and your baby, who hasn’t stayed quiet for two hours in a row in its entire four-week-long life, isn’t, and you think, “Oh my god: what is this new state, and can it possibly last…?”
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