The Method is the Message

This year, author Andrew O'Hagan made a new year’s resolution to write a novel on an old-fashioned typewriter.
“I’m sick of computers and all their bleeps and updates and their terrible openness to interruptions,” he wrote in the Globe and Mail. “… this year I am determined to slow everything down to the careful old thump, the beat of the heart.”
If I had read this just a few months ago, I would have rolled my eyes and groaned.
“Here we have another dinosaur of the Literary Establishment,” I would have thought, leaping to judgement like the proverbial dumb lemming jumping over the cliff. “Out of touch with the modern world, probably subsisting on university tenure and arts agency grants, while the rest of us go careening through the Twitterverse of instant content and digital media.”
Slowing it down is a luxury we writers don’t have in today’s world, I would have said. After all, I’ve written six novels and thousands of stories on my computer, since I began my career as a journalist and author 17 years ago.
But something strange happened to me a few months ago. I started writing a new novel– with a ballpoint pen, in lined notebooks.
I am almost ashamed to make this confession. I know I sound like a fossil. But the two voices in the novel belong to a 10-year-old girl writing in her journal, and an old dodo bird who has miraculously escaped extinction. And no matter how much I sat, staring at the LED screen, with my hands poised over the keyboard, neither of them would come to me on a computer.
Yes, scoff at me. (I would have scoffed, too, not long ago). But the Muse works in mysterious ways. Perhaps what I am experiencing is a sort of “method acting,” for writers. Call it method writing.
It’s a laborious process, to write the first draft out in longhand But somehow, it allows me to understand the feelings of my characters in a way that typing at the computer does not. Perhaps the screen, instead of being a ‘window’ into the fictional world, has become a barrier. Computers simply do too much. As I sit in front of my computer, my mind is suddenly and unwittingly cluttered with thoughts of online banking, and scheduling appointments, and responding to emails about children’s school activities. It isn’t even the frivolity of Facebook and Twitter that distracts me; it’s the mundane and unrelenting demands of everyday life.
The blank page of a notebook is a sanctuary. It makes no demands. Instead, it offers a single invitation — the invitation to write.
“Writing is an action, not an afterthought, it is a job of love and faith, not a sneeze … Why are we so determined to take the effort out of everything and save time? The fun of getting it right is the joy of work,” Andrew O’Hagan wrote.
Good on you, Andrew. While you’re sitting there, clickety-clacking on your typewriter, I’ll be curled on my sofa, scribbling in my notebook.
Taking the time to get it right.