Writing and Wondering

TOOLS

My granddaughter Ella, who is a rising fourth-grader with the instincts of an inventor, made a quill pen for me the other day. We’d all been on a family camping trip to a lake, where some Canada geese took up with us. The geese knew easy marks when they saw them and hit us up for a lot of the food supply, but they did leave pretty good tips. Ella came home with a collection of feathers—sleek black tail feathers, exactly the kind you see in paintings of Shakespeare as he writes To be or not to be on a sheet of foolscap.

Turns out you can make a quill pen by taking apart a ballpoint and inserting its innards into the quill. It works. It’s quicker and less messy than the old routine of sharpening the end of the quill and sticking it in the ink pot, although that used to work too. There’s little financial outlay, no carbon footprint, no new systems to learn every year or so, no early obsolescence, no sudden crashes that wipe out a year of work. Many a novel has been written with a quill pen, and in the days when a novel could run seven hundred or so pages. So was much of the world’s poetry. So was the Magna Carta and the U.S Constitution (at least in draft), and I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare.

Which is the context in which I’m saying I’ve just spent upwards of a month on a single chapter of the book I’m working on, because at the same time I’m struggling through a triple learning curve: my new little Netbook that is way more technically sophisticated than I am, Windows 7 (after Vista), and Word 2010 (coming straight from Word 2003 without pausing for breath at 2007.)

For years I wrote on a typewriter—I’m that old. For a long time it wasn’t even a typewriter that plugged in. Those typewriters lasted forever. I think you could throw one off a cliff and still write with it afterward. And they didn’t think. They didn’t even think they could think, much less know way, way more than you did. They just sat there on the desk, and when you wrote something with them, it stayed written. Of course if you wanted to edit anything you had to type the whole page over again, if not the whole piece of work. Or else you could erase the offending lines with one of those little round erasers that scraped away layers of paper and left holes if you weren’t careful. Or you could paint over them—anybody remember Wite-Out?—leaving a manuscript that seemed to suffer from leprosy. Once in a former lifetime I typed an entire doctoral dissertation for someone on a large manual typewriter—eight copies. With carbon paper. And an eraser, used very, very sparingly. No Wite-Out–that was against the rules. Copy machines did, yes, exist, but in that archaic period using one for a dissertation was also against the rules. (If any of the former UNC Epidemiology students I know happen to read this…see what you missed?)

So I guess I wouldn’t turn back time. There’s no such thing as a perfect relationship or a perfect writing tool. But there is an argument to be made for Ella’s quill pen.

A couple of weeks ago my winter classes at the ArtsCenter ended, and in a few hours the first of the spring ones will begin.  Once again I’ve been thinking about what a hotspot this area is for artists, in the broadest sense: visual artists, musicians, craftspeople, storymakers.  As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that all of us everywhere come into life with a need to make art that is as real as the need to eat.  I suppose it’s the same need that, millions of years ago, got us started talking to each other.  Life keeps happening to us, and we have to take it in and examine it and do something of our own with it and put it back out there, one way or another.  Breathing in and breathing out—otherwise known as making art. 

When I walk into the ArtsCenter this evening, I expect to meet some more truly interesting people I’ll be glad to have in my life.  Some of them may not have written seriously before—meaning working at a project, revising, polishing, shaping-up—although most will probably have been writers in one way or another for as long as they can remember.  I look forward to knowing them, and to meeting again the ones who have been in past classes.

 And if this term is like most of the past ones, I’ll learn some things I didn’t know before.  It’s surprising what I’ve learned when I thought I was dealing with things like setting up a scene and handling viewpoint and so on.  Here are a few of many, many items I wouldn’t know about yet if I didn’t teach writing classes:

That there are a great many camels in Australia (imported, like the rabbits.)

What it looks like inside a camel’s hump.

What you have to do to exhume a body legally, and what it’s like when you do.

What you got to eat in restaurants in Siberia right after the cold war.

What monkeys are like up close and personal.

That there is a right way and a wrong way to tie a hangman’s noose, and that if you do it wrong, death is slow and agonizing rather than quick and painless (although we have only hearsay evidence for that last bit.)

That there is a whole genre devoted to imitations of books, movies, tv shows, etc. you admire, and it’s been around long enough that I find it embarrassing not to know about it.  So thank you people, for bringing me into the real world!

 I can only write in the morning.

I can’t write when I’m tired.

I need a free block of time before I can write.

I can’t write when I don’t feel inspired.

Nope.  And nope, nope, nope.  And if I needed to have all that proved to me yet again, it just now was—all this fall, which I spent, in between and around and sometimes instead of most everything else, going through the final smoothing, polishing, concept-tightening and so on for the new book that’s reached the stage of This Is It.  Yes, when it was late at night, yes, when I was tired, yes, when I only had ten minutes.  And inspired?  The Muse, if anyone wants to know, isn’t the darling goddess who murmurs perfect prose into your ear and fires you with the urge to write it.  The true Muse is the Deadline, even when that deadline is partly self-imposed.  She is twelve feet tall, and stands next to your computer glaring and tapping her watch, and saying things like “You’re going to let that chapter out of your hands with that drivel in it?”  And she is, I keep re-learning, the goddess who helps my writing the most.

The summer 2010 session of my Writers at Work class at the ArtsCenter ended last week, and once again I’m impressed by how many people there are in this area who are putting their words and thoughts out there and who are doing it truly well.  As always, some of this group came in with more experience than others with the mechanics of the craft, but experience is something that happens as you keep going. It comes through paying close attention as you read to how other writers do it, it comes through getting with people who are writing and talking about that, it can come through an occasional class or workshop.  Mostly  it comes through writing and revising, writing and revising…and you can copy those three words and paste them in as many times as you want.  The people in this class are all genuinely good writers now, and if they keep writing and if they give their writing its place in their lives, they will keep getting even better.  I promise.