On the Writing of World Without Pain: The Story of a Search
Writers are divided on the issue of writing with keyboards or by hand. Some swear that for the first draft they require the immediacy of pen and paper, while others consider that method too slow – or they like to revise as they go, which is easier when all you have to do is delete and replace words. Personally I prefer to use a computer because it’s faster and I can quickly correct my mistakes, delete errant passages, and even rearrange whole blocks of text. When I was writing World Without Pain, though, I wrote by hand in a series of pocket-sized notebooks. This was necessary because at the time my family of wife and three small kids had just come off of a months-long fulltime road trip in a camper van. We’d traveled from Italy to Greece and then toured Greece until we settled in Athens. I spent a lot of time sitting in the driver’s seat waiting for them sometimes, and when I did, and I’d pull out my current notebook and compose. The first draft, therefore, came together in blocks of time I’d snatch during other activities. When I transferred it onto computer, I embellished it by adding more details.
World Without Pain is about my early days on the road when I hitchhiked and took public transportation to Central America, across the United States, around Europe, and across the Middle East to India. During that journey too I wrote my impressions in notebooks, but alas, those notebooks are long lost and I never had a chance to transcribe them. All I have left are my memories of sitting down in places like a beach in Goa, India, or a hillside outside Kathmandu, Nepal, and writing about my journey and what I was going through. As I put it in Chapter 6 of World Without Pain: “Sometime after I left Seattle subsequent to my trip to Europe and Asia I realized that I had found my voice, that is, my voice as a writer. I can’t point out the specific time and place; it was more like a revelation that slowly grew from within. I had carried some small notebooks with cardboard covers around with me from the States to Europe, to the East and back. Sporadically, at odd moments, whenever the urge hit me, I would write a few lines, sometimes a paragraph or two. I remember specifically sitting and composing under a palm tree on the beach at Goa, and on a hillside near the Monkey Temple in Nepal. I never thought much of it at the time, but later when I could see the words in a different perspective it came to me that these were moments of truth, and that what I had written was prose poetry. I had spent years before I set out on the road trying to write, studying the basics of it, and then I had set myself into forward motion, towards strange situations, towards adventure – so that when I poured out what was in my head it was uniquely me, uniquely mine and nobody else’s, not even the masters that I had studied for so long and had tried so hard to emulate. Once this became clear to me I bought more notebooks, similar to the others in design but larger and thicker, and had the confidence to write much more than I ever had before. The time I spent writing and the words I produced were my light in the midst of the ever-present darkness of physical hardship, adversity, and poverty I had to endure.“
I want to point out that if you are a writer, precisely how you pour out your words doesn’t matter. The main thing to do is to write the words, however you accomplish it. Not long ago I bought a notebook similar to those I took on the road in the 1970s, thinking that perhaps I might find moments when I would want to write longhand – for instance, if I was sitting out on my apartment balcony and didn’t want to bother bringing out the computer and something to set it on. And I have used this notebook occasionally, but not often. After having it around for months only a few pages are filled. My computer, on the other hand, gets hours and hours of use every day.
To each his own. As for the notebooks in which I wrote the first draft of World Without Pain, due to the demands of day to day life I had to set them aside after I finished; it was months before I found the time to transcribe and add to them. That’s another advantage of writing directly onto the computer – you can skip the task of transcription. However I managed to accomplish it, I’m glad I wrote this memoir of my hippy travel days, and I hope you enjoy reading of my early adventures.
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