My First Blog (Ever)

"My First Blog" sounds like "My First Doll" or "My First Potty"--a purchase one might pick up for a baby growing into toddlerhood. But this is truly my first-ever blog. Despite have written over a dozen novels and quite a few short stories and essays, until today my blog virginity has remained intact. I'm sure it says something about my lack of ease with the electronic format that I drafted this out longhand on a yellow legal pad.

The yellow legal pad is where all my writing begins. I always finish on a computer, but I never start on one. Sitting in front of a glowing screen feels like work, and for me writing must be play. And so just like I used to sprawl out with my drawing pad and markers when I was a kid, I sprawl with my legal pad and pen and let that same part of my imagination take over.

Later, once I've completed a draft, I turn to the computer, the perfect tool for revision. Need to get rid of that tangent where I clearly lost my mind for three paragraphs? Block and delete. Need to move a passage from one chapter to another? Easy breezy. The computer is such an ideal revision tool that I can't imagine how I would have revised my work in the pre-digital age. Retype the entire manuscript on paper? No, thanks. I probably would've been too lazy to be a novelist and would have had to develop a talent for shorter forms, like limericks and haikus. Plus, there's the whole issue of authors only having one copy of their work on paper, a copy which could easily be lost or destroyed--a thought that makes me so anxious I have to stop writing about it right now.

When I talk to other writers, I'm always fascinated by their individual approaches to the process. In addition to the longhand versus computer question, there are environmental issues: In an office, café, or comfy room? In absolute quiet or with music or background noise?

One piece of advice I always give busy grownup writers is don't write only when your ideal conditions are met. Flexibility is important. When I was much younger an much more wrapped up in the idea of being "an artiste," I used lots of statements about my writing which contained the word "only": "I can only write at night after everyone else is asleep." "I can only write with a cup of Earl Grey tea." "I can only write on Big Chief Tablets like John Boy Walton used" (I know, this one is weird). These statements, while they must have spoken to my identity at the time, were horribly self-limiting. If I had an idea I was ready to run with, why wait until everybody else was in bed? Why delay my creative urge because I had the wrong brand of paper or was down to Darjeeling in my tea stash?

As a busy grownup writer, I have learned to toss away superstitions about when, where, and how I can or cannot write. Ten minutes early picking up the kid at school? Whip out that legal pad and write on the dashboard. Why read a two-year-old issue of "Good Housekeeping" in the doctor's waiting room when I could use the time to write instead? Every week I try to get in a couple of stretches of writing under closer to ideal circumstances, but the writing I do on the fly adds up as well. And when I've finished my draft and start revising, I can't tell the difference between the work I did during a long, interrupted stretch versus what I wrote while waiting for an oil change. Some of it's good and some of it's bad, but the quality seems unrelated to the writing circumstances.

Writers write. It's what we do, though sometimes we get so particular about the wheres and hows of it that we do less of it than we should. That being said, I'm still mighty partial to my yellow legal pads.