I haven’t been keeping up with my contacts on flickr this week. So I’m having a marathon session searching back through them for today’s post. Of course, as always there’s so much that inspires me …
© stpiduko
© meeralee
© Suse W.
© - katarína -
© DerrickT
My friend encouraged me to read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and so I bought it yesterday.
He also encouraged me to start writing every day, in a notebook, with a real pen … on real paper. What a novel idea. Everything I write is on a screen with a keyboard. Who is to say which is the more ‘authentic’ writing experience? Both have their merits, both their drawbacks. I wrote this to him in an email:
I am going to start writing every day. I’m going to write with a pen in a notebook. Perhaps. Or I might write on the computer. I don’t know yet. There’s something, like with writing a hand-written letter, about writing your thoughts down on paper. You can’t delete them (put a line through what you’ve written and it’s still there, only obscured). Plus, the act of writing is more creative, I think. You’re making marks on a piece of paper that are yours – the actual marks mean something, as well as the concepts and meanings they convey. However, writing onto a computer offers a different sort of freedom. You can edit to a greater extent than you self-edit/self-censor when writing with a pen. Editing isn’t always a bad thing. It can force you to re-read your words, to consider them, and to act on them, even if only through the act of editing. It may, in fact, be a more contemplative process.
Of the two, I’m drawn to writing in a notebook. Perhaps because it’s more romantic, and it just _feels_ more authentic. However, writing this email to you, I keep pausing, contemplating what I’ve written and what I can write next. I think about the structure of what I’m writing, as well as the content. It’s a more complete process, whereas writing in a notebook is more raw, immediate and incomplete. Of course, there’s nothing to stop me trying out one method and changing if I don’t get on with it. Also, I could always write initially in a notebook, and then transcribe it to the computer at a later date. That, actually, might be quite a useful process to go through. On the other hand, perhaps it is better to write and never go back. The act itself being cathartic, rather than what you actually write.
I might do both. I bought some notebooks yesterday (satisfying my insane lust for stationery), but I also like typing. No reason I can’t do both. Both could be good. Options are good, limitations are bad, m’kay?
My biggest problem is that I can sit and think about doing something for hours, no, days, rather than getting down to it. Why do something that will take an hour to do when you can talk about doing it for a day first? (Which brings us to my problems with verbosity – why say in 1 sentence something that can be intimately described in 6 paragraphs?)
