In the mornings I write by hand. A writer friend who also has two young kids said, Why would you want to add an extra step?
But I am looking for every way to evade the voice of doom and doubt, to connect directly to the writer, this being in me, unexpected even after all these years of pretending to be her, who writes confidently, with pleasure, laying down line after line. It’s manual labor, nothing too heavy, but physical, like a brisk walk or unpacking books. Satisfying. You can step back and see the empty box, the colored spines juxtaposed along the shelf. Not the scrawl on the page, forcing me to lean close to decipher it, but the listening. In the quiet of the mornings, I am both willing and able to listen to the voice within–certain, creative, with plenty to say–that speaks in cantering rhythms. That voice always speaks, not only in the mornings, but as the day wears on and the world wakes up, the voice within is drowned out by the screech of doubt, the howls of fear, the incessant chatter of gossip about how other people might react to the work, to the play.
When I was twelve, thirteen, my friend Eliza and I would go visit her grandmother in Santa Cruz. Her grandmother, Mary Holmes, was a painter who lived on many acres on top of a mountain, and kept cats, dogs, goats and horses. Well, ponies, really. There was a Shetland pony and a taller one, and we’d strap the stuffed cotton pads onto them and ride bareback along the wooded trails to stretches of path wide and smooth enough that we could fly forward, breaking from the choppy conversational trot into the fluid canter, speed catching us, changing the nature of movement. It was all in the shift from jostle and bump bump bump to the unfurling singular lift and speed. The great, awkward beast of muscle and whorls of thick, wiry hair and hooves becoming holy transit, one motion, one means.
This is what can happen in the morning, with the ink scribbling out along the narrow lines of my journal. With a squeeze, the body’s signal, a sudden thrust of heel to flank, everything flows. The line of words lifts from the rocky necessity of thumping against hard ground and takes flight. The trees blur. Hair flies back and smiles foolish with glee, unaware of themselves, seize control of the face. To become one with something–a pony, your best junior high school friend, your own storytelling mind–is a gift worth getting up early to claim.
This is a beautiful and inspiring post. I used to write by hand, until I typed so much that I found handwriting difficult – causing physical cramps in my hands, and slow. Slow probably isn’t such a bad thing. I don’t usually have it in me to get up early to write, I feel so sleep-deprived already. I often write just before midnight but that’s tiring too. Writing feels like something that heals me, and yet I don’t always have a clear sense of how to get there – to the writing, to a sense of having something to write. I like writing as thinking, as you quoted. That makes sense to me.
Jenny–Yes, slow can be helpful. I even edited in my early morning time today because I needed to slow the scenes down. Night time writing, noon writing–whatever works. Small bits–let it count. Set the timer for ten minutes and let that be enough. It does feel so good.
Beautiful prose, Elizabeth. I rode down that path with you. Breathless. Smiling. Thank you. I no longer write by hand. Carpal tunnel. But I have many journals I’ve filled over years and years. Large scrawl. Not many words to a page. A long time ago another writer Jewel Gomez freed me to write in journals. I used to not want to muss them up with my handwriting which always veered off the page (as if I was riding a wild pony!) I still jot things down on envelopes. One line, here. A gesture I see a character making in my mind’s eye. An idea for a story, notes for a scene that must be written. I miss the rhythm of writing by hand. A keyboard has it’s own demands, it’s own rhythms. I find the ticking clacking sound becomes musical notes and affects the writing. So hurrah for those who can still write by hand. I never could hold a writing instrument properly…and now it’s darn near impossible to do so for more than a minute or three. The divine Ms. Toni Morrison insists that the writer should continue to write by hand. She agrees with you, or so I’ve heard, that there’s something about writing by hand that embodies the soul. Computers, not unlike the printing press, have been a blessing for writers. A strange machine that let’s one keep going as fast as the mind wishes. (Sometimes to our determent since it looks so beautiful and perfect…the way the words are evenly spaced…the lines balanced across the page. It becomes hard to stop oneself from typing on, no matter how little one may be saying. So as hard as it is to do, let me stop.