A couple of posts ago I mentioned
that I do all of my story writing on my laptop. I typed faster than I wrote; it
was easier to change things in Word, which helped me loosen up and get into the
flow; it was just more convenient…blah, blah, blah. All that is still mostly
true. Typing is faster and definitely more environmentally friendly when you
have handwriting like a gigantic chicken’s (4 handwritten pages = about 2 typed
pages for me). Instead of ripping out entire pages and starting over, you hit
the backspace key. In short: I thought I was done with handwritten first
drafts.
I’m not. Here’s what changed my
mind.
A couple weeks ago I started a new
project. It was going to be about girl power and superheroes and steampunk, and
I was incredibly excited to start writing it. So, I began typing it into Google
Docs…and tanked after just one chapter.
About a week later I started another
project that I was also incredibly excited about (my ideas tend to come in
batches). This one was about girl power and zombies. I began typing it into
Google docs and—same story—burned out near the middle of the second chapter.
A week after that I was working on developing another idea I had; one I’d had
for ages and really, really wanted to do right. And I began to think of all the
false starts I’ve had over the past couple of years, and how they all turned
out basically the same—after only a few pages I lost confidence in the idea and
just couldn’t think of any way to improve it.
Around the same time I was also rereading
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
(if you haven’t already read this book, you need to) and I got to chapter four.
Chapter four is all about using your hands, and in it Austin Kleon recommends doing
your first drafts on paper— “The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist
in us”.
I don’t think that my uptight
perfectionist really needs any help being brought out, but after reading that
chapter I remembered how much fun I used to have handwriting my first drafts.
Sure, they were all crap, but everything I wrote back then was crap and at
least I had fun. So I decided that for my newest project, I’d try to go back to
using a pen and a legal pad, and see what happened.
I’m not far in enough yet to tell if
it will stick—and if I won’t end up abandoning this one, too—but I am having a
TON more fun scribbling on wide-ruled paper than I ever did typing into Google
Docs, at least recently. My writing is flowing, not dribbling out in bits and
pieces like it usually does on the computer. And at the end of a session, when
I sit back and look at the hunk of paper sitting on my desk, I feel like I’ve
actually created something.
I’m not saying that all my first
drafts will be handwritten from now on (but who knows?) or that the computer is
some kind of demon instrument. It’s just that different writers find different
methods that work for them, and I’m still very much in the process of finding one
that works for me. Something about seeing my terrible handwriting on paper
makes it easier for me to accept the imperfections in the first draft, and once
I can do that, actually finishing it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And
that’s a wonderful feeling.
