With Pen and Paper

I've just treked through snow to the top of my gumboots to come to my local library to use the computer. Mine's been in for repairs since last week, and I don't fancy driving half an hour along steep and slippery roads to go and pick it up. We've been muffled inside great white drifts of snow since last week, although now there is sign of a thaw and all is drip, drip, drip and the trees are shaking the heavy snow from their backs like dogs.

 

It's been a novelty not having my computer. For starters, I've realised how much time I spend on it, either writing or bumbling about on the Internet, reading things, looking things up, writing emails…the list goes on. The days seem much longer now that I haven't had the opportunity to occupy myself this way.

I've resorted to writing my current book the old fashioned way – with pen and paper. I thought it would be terribly difficult doing it this way. I thought it just wouldn't bee the same without the music I was used to writing to, without the abiltiy to type almost fast enough to keep up with my thoughts, with having to at least try to remember how to spell things so that it would make sense when I read it over.

But it turns out, that no matter how superstitious I was about all the little routines and rituals I thought were essential to my writing process, that when it comes down to it, as long as you have something on which to record the words, you can write. I've been sitting on my bed, pen in hand, pad of paper on lap, no headphones playing music to block out the world, and I've written the story just like always.

It's been a very interesting exercise, but the worst of it is that now I know there's never an excuse not to get those words onto a page – any page.

I'm almost enjoying it. There are no disctractions – no emails coming in to steal my attention away, no thought of quickly looking up some obscure fact and spending half an hour wading through the Internet instead of writing. It's just me and the page.

I guess that's really all there is to this job in the end – just the writer and the page.

Filed under: Writing Journal