A while back I mentioned to a colleague that I do a lot of my writing in the early morning. Soon after, I began finding IM messages on my computer that coincided with the time I was writing. It didn't bother me. Because, in those early morning sessions, I don't write on my computer. Funny. I guess he assumed I did.
Well, between that elephant-sized hint and the title of this diatribe, I'm sure most have guessed that, yes, I often write by hand, if only the first draft. Now, I haven't told this colleague that little detail. I wasn't deliberately trying to mislead him. I just hadn't thought about it. It's been that long.
My point is, I discovered long ago that it can be much more productive to at least begin a project writing it by hand. Oh, sure. I, like most, at first jumped to the conclusion that once I had a computer, I'd never need to write by hand again. Hah! Little did I know...
Because it took me years to learn that, the advantage of writing by hand is precisely what most people want to avoid: that it slows you down. Because this can be a good thing. I admit, when I bought my first computer, I thought I'd write everything on it-- throw out all those pencils and paper! But, I soon found out that most of what I wrote was, well, let's just say, less than stellar.
In fact, the biggest problem was that I found myself often "going off on literary tangents," sometimes writing as much as three pages that were completely off-topic and, for all intents and purposes, rubbish, no matter how well they may have been worded.
Even worse, I would also find it difficult to edit these off-topic items out of the original text. They were interesting; they were "good" (at least, I thought so). But, the cold, hard, fact of the matter was, they didn't belong within the body of the text.
For a while I tried to cut/paste these out and save them for later. It wasn't until I found myself re-writing the same idea (only realizing later that I'd already saved it) that I saw how stupid this was.
And, slowly but surely, I found myself returning to writing by hand. All logical thinking said this was stupid; that I was giving myself extra work because I'd only have to re-write or input it later. And this was true. But as I started using this method, I also discovered that my focus miraculously improved. Why? Because when you write by hand, it's harder. And, because it's harder, I found myself unconsciously choosing my words more carefully, selecting my phrases more prudently and, most of all, sticking to the subject at hand.
Now, when other ideas occur to me, I jot them down on a separate tablet, in a running list that I keep nearby. And when I do go to my computer, the basic text is complete and untarnished by off-topic residue. Then, when I need an idea, I go back over the list and pick one out.
This may not work for everyone. But it works for me. And it may work for others who are similarly afflicted with, as Stephen King once termed it, "diarrhea of the computer."--mo
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