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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Sunday, January 10, 2010
Writing is a hostile art.
It would seem passive, since one doesn't have to break out sharp tools to shape wood, or heat glass until it's molten - no, just think of the right verbs and put them in sentences, and write them down. The only work is in the writing - pen scratching (hopefully smoothly! I take pens from stores when signing a check, if they scrawl smoothly), or keys being tapped…
And yet it's the thinking that's the anguish. At least, for me it is. I do it compulsively, banging away at a machine, trying to report whatever is the present topic. I get up in the morning, make coffee, feed the birds, let the cat in or out, and write at least a thousand words, every day. Most days, I'm comfortably over fifteen-hundred words. Lately, over two thousand a day. Writing about this and that, reporting the mundane events (I can look up how frequently I bought bird seed from my copious notes, going back some years, now), or delving into some concept that strikes my fancy, like an intellectual magpie.
But thinking of the words, whatever the compulsion to sit down might be, is the hard work. Just now, between paragraphs, I found myself walking around the machine (presently working on a laptop), looking at it, waiting for some sign of animation, some new reason to engage with it. Apparently, I found one, as I'm sitting here typing this, but it's like trying to dance with a cadaver.
You look for some sign, some twitch of recognition and invitation, some sign of liveliness, but at the end of it, you're going to have to do all the work. So you tentatively lift a lifeless hand, the fingernails grayish-blue, and cup it as the foxtrot teacher told you. Rigor mortis has passed, the fingers are nearly supple.
If you breathe just right, and pretend, you can take this lifeless mass and put glow in the cheeks, and feel warmish breath, and step around the room with it, and sit down and bang out a few hundred words, and maybe keep as much as half?
That's compulsive typing; I often won't call it writing, since the least I can say is that I typed, and there's the word count to prove it.
I could have learned how to type in school, but that was a course that was off-limits to boys, if unofficially. Typing, prior to the computer age, was a skill only required by stenographers (and okay, journalists and writers, but I didn't know I was going to be devoted to that), which was a job held only by women, as nursing seemed to be, even merely a few years ago. Bookkeeping was acceptable for boys to take, but the typing class was filled nearly exclusively by girls.
I ought to have seen further ahead - I had determined, when I was a boy, that I wanted to grow up and be a writer. My mother was a writer, yet died young, so I intended to somehow fulfill her legacy. It never occurred to me that to write, you just have to start writing, like crossing a mountain range. You just keep walking. But I didn't learn how to type when I was in school; if I had, maybe everything would have been different.
In my youth, I wrote, but longhand, and would soon tire of it. I remember one extended effort, that lasted for some months, in which I wrote about a thousand words a day, longhand, in the morning (as I do now) and in the evening. I still have the notebook; it's comical to read that stuff from long ago.
I'd get frustrated, though, and stop writing. For one, my hand couldn't keep up with my mind, so it would take too long to get to the delicious, juicy end of the paragraph I had just imagined, if I had to fill in the preceding blanks. And for another, the tedium of writing longhand would wear me out. My hand would get sore.
In my mid-twenties, I was briefly unemployed. Something snapped, and I brought home a typing course book from the library, got out my grandmother's old Smith Corona from the 50s (still had an unfinished letter from then in the carriage; one of my uncles had given it to her to foster more letters - apparently, she didn't like to type).
Every day, for three weeks, typing from that book was about all I did, other than sleeping and eating. Bangity-bang, all the exercises, over and over and over, and at the end of it, I was doing an almost-solid forty words a minutes, with one error or two.
And I began to be able to keep up with my mind, and I writing improved (you'll have to take my word for it; I'm developing a website that will archive all the writing I have in a digital format - all of it that's publishable, so hundreds of poems and essays - eventually, I'll accrue an amanuensis, and all the other stuff will find its way to a forum).
Years later, having earned some money by typing, and having had some stuff published (however modest the publication), I have developed the habit. When I eventually had a computer of my own, I typed whenever I felt I had the chance, which wasn't often or disciplined enough.
But 2004 rolled around, and I decided I would write every day. At first, I had to remind myself, but soon, I fell into a stride.
I pledged to adhere to a simple rule: when it was time to type, I would sit down and type, and if I couldn't think of anything to write about, that was what I would write.
I would incorporate some thing I had witnessed in my frequent time outside, and a format developed. Most of my life is chronicled since then, but I have also used the same file as a source of raw material, like a cornstalk holding up a fat cob.
So that daily file in which I type, which gets partitioned off into chunks in a directory as I go through the seasons, grows and grows. Lately, it's up to close to three million words for the last six years (and consigned to a repository in Indiana, in the hands of a literary executor - to be published, or not, in event of my death and at his discretion - some juicy stuff in there!).
I consider them my notes, so I'm really the most compulsive notetaker I know.
And when I sat down to write this, I didn't know where I was going, but gradually found out as I went, so thanks for taking the same risk I did (although comfortably easier; good for you).
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