pens: use and abuse

M, I did try melatonin for an Australian trip maybe twenty years ago, and have forgotten whether it made any difference. Should have tried it again this time!

The other day I wrote up a thing about using a fountain pen for writing fiction, and I got distracted from whatever blog it was directed to. Found it on a scrap of e-paper here. Forgive me if I've already sent it.

I've written about 25 novels over the course of a 40-year career, and although I do keep up with technology (this is being typed on a new super-slim Maobook Air), back in the eighties I stopped writing fiction with a keyboard, and reverted to writing in longhand in bound blank books.

It's not speed; I write slowly no matter what the medium. I think it's the element of craft, or a physicality even less exalted than that. When I've finished a book I've made an object; something I can put up on the shelf. That shelf is a palpable record of my career. In some odd way it makes the writing real.

I'm not a Luddite; I've loved computers since my first Apple // in the early eighties. I type up my work and send it up into the sky for safekeeping every couple of days, in case the unthinkable happens and my book is destroyed or stolen.

But when I turn on the computer to type, I can feel something tighten up inside me; when I uncap the fountain pen, a similar something loosens. It's as real as a necktie.

Not that I have anything against typing; I sort of enjoy it except when I'm sitting and retyping something.


And another thing I think I neglected to post . . .

Wasted a couple of hours with a poorly made movie yesterday, Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary. A kind of fictionalized biopic about the young Hunter S Thompson in Puerto Rico. Good period stuff, good location, but the movie went flat for me. Most reviewers loved it. I expected to, but then I'm not a great audience for movies about writers. (Maybe the actors have too much fun. They never seem to sit down by themselves for hours every day. I guess that wouldn't make great cinema . . . )


On LiveJournal I'll post a pretty bad picture I did yesterday. I didn't really feel like painting, but the day was so perfect I couldn't let it go to waste, so took pen and watercolors and paper down to the Public Garden. Turned out kind of blobby and blah. But since I usually only post pictures if I think they worked, here's one for contrast:





Joe