4 WRITING PROCESS: WRITING BY HAND

Wendy’s Newsletter No. 4 Thursday March 12 2015

Hello again. Thank you for returning to my Newsletter.

If this is your first time, welcome.

Being a writer demands acts of courage, large and small, such as:

·         

Working entirely alone and sustaining your self belief

·         Writing with honesty and telling the truth

·         Tapping into strong elements of your own experience and telling some kind if truth that will relate to more generic human experiences.

·         Having faith in your vision of the world even if it doesn’t fit the genre-ridden business model of modern publishing,

·         Most of all I have discovered other small acts of courage which involve opening a new notebook and making a start on new work.  

A very common question for me and other writers when we meet writers and readers is’

How do you set about it? What is the process?

After saying very carefully that all writers evolve their own idiosyncratic method I usually admit that I write my first draft by hand.

These days this admission is met by a degree of disbelief and a kind of pity that one feels for a bag lady in the road. There is sometimes a frown. 'I would have thought computers would have been a Godsend for you! Make things easier.' Then (add in kind tone of voice) 'They're very easy to use you know,'

Well, I do know. 

I love my computer(s).They are brilliant for instant researching, for blogging and Facebooking and now Newslettering. I think I might have been a pioneer in that field.  I remember the joy of my first word-processer, an Amstrad 9512 - such a brilliant improvement after my electric typewriter and my bottles of SnoPake.  

I shudder at the thought of the state of my original manuscripts - which were accepted by publishers. Never mind. Daphne du Maurier sent her publishers scribbled hand-scripted drafts…

I do like to write in ink pen or, when pushed, a sweetly flowing gel-pen.

These days I own and make use of an office computer, a standard laptop and more recently a tablet.  So nowadays my drafts, well edited and neatly transcribed, reach the publisher in the immaculate computer-rendered form that I always recommend to all my students.

So, why, you may ask  do you not write now straight onto the screen? 

That is a non-starter for me.  I have experimented with drafting straight onto the screen and rejected is as far too rigid, too self-limiting. For me, staring at a screen neutralises the diverse energy of the creative mind. It hinders the nascent surprise of the millions of word in your head clustering around an idea, a concept, an inspiration as it leaps into the imagination in sentence form.

But as blocks and pages of screen-rafts build up on the screen, clearly they are too finished too complete, too self-referring, and insufficiently open. They have too much authority and too little vulnerability.

These blocks of print in the screen utterly lack the liquidity of blood transferred from the brain, down the arm to the ink or the gel that makes the mark on the page.

So for me, although computers are a wonderful gift for the end process, in the beginning the work must exist in a fluid, tentative state in notebook – always available for changing, imagining, creating and re-creating your story.

So, the only way for me to write the first draft of a novel is in a bound notebook (NOT loose pages, not ring bound…) with an ink or a gel pen.

Everyone has their own protocols.

But normally I write in bound hardback A4 notebooks. I only write on the right-hand side of the page, leaving the left-hand space for insertions, scribbled self-instructions and amendments. This often evolves into a kind of dialogue with myself about the story. The empty left hand page is crucial to my process.

At first it’s like writing my way up a hill, my ink-pen finding its way through a new landscape, dislodging here and there a tiny pressed petal or a strand of grass. The ink suffices, makes its mark.

In the end, like many things that have seemed hard, almost impossible, it has been easy. 

After drafting 20 thousand words of a new novel I embark on the first lot of transcription onto the computer, (It’s important to wait until there is this bank of original drafting before it gets onto a rigid screen.) Firts I write on a fresh page in my notebook all the queries and questions, changes and modifications that have emerged in the process of transcription

It is important not to be tempted into a full blown edit at this point. Leave that to the very end.

Then more ink drafting in 20,000 blocks. Then more transcription. I sometimes find that I have scenes and scraps, brainstorms and locations in other notebooks. I can blame that on my habit of writing on trains, in cafes, pubs and parks on whatever is to hand. So the transcribing of this first part of the novel can extend to time hunting down scenes out of sequence.

This is when I say to myself that EVERYTHING – whether or not I think it is really part of the novel - should go somewhere into the three notebooks 

As I follow these protocols, the contents of my three A4 notebooks, will organically emerge as an 80,000 word novel, give or take. Two A4 notebooks can emerge as a 40,000 novella. 

As I have said, it takes acts of courage to embark on a large writing project in this fashion. Trying my protocols might help you in these acts of courage:

·         Working entirely alone and sustaining your self belief

·         Writing with honesty and telling the truth

·         Tapping into strong elements of your own experience and telling some kind if truth that will relate to more generic human experiences.

·         Having faith in your vision of the world even if it doesn’t fit the genre-ridden business model of modern publishing,

For me the smallest and the largest acts of courage involve opening a new notebook and making a start on new work.

Next week – The benefits of the computer as a creative tool for self-editing.