Touchpoint.

I've come to one of those odd realizations about my writing, which has led to an equally odd "writerly" moment.

The way that I write now offers me far too many options for excuses. For example: My "office," such as it is, is a space about six feet wide and four feet deep in an oddly walled-off portion of my upstairs, with just one door leading in from the bedroom. I'm sure a real estate agent might call it part of the master suite. In case of fire, I have no option but to dive out a window. The space is encroached upon by a vast array of misplaced clothing. Once a season we break out pitchforks and torches and force it back from the borders of my "office," but sooner or later the piles re-embolden themselves and have another go at annexing what little psuedocreative space I have. (Which amounts to a desk with a computer on it.) In addition: My house was built in 1850. The bedroom and the office are in what was the original house, which was at one point a single story. Thus, this area used to be the attic and it's not exactly packing a refreshing flow of ventilation. Two windows on one wall. Opening them, research has proven, does nothing to encourage the stale, superheated attic air to actually move. I know there's a crawlspace above the room that runs to the "main" part of the house and it's got a gable vent and two roof vents, but apparently it's just a place where hot likes to spend the summer.

Which is why, in summer, the office becomes a superb sauna. While this is very good for my pores and overall complexion, it's not conducive to me spending any time in there writing. (Other than the inspired short poem, Ode to That Rivulet of Sweat Carefully but Surely Making Its Way Down to My Shorts, which won the Murray Feldman Memorial Perspire-A-Poem contest in 2008.)

We have a small netbook that we use for wireless internet downstairs, but its Lilliputian keys don't play nicely with the unique--okay, almost entirely effed up--method of manic, mostly-two-fingered-but-sometimes-up-to-four hunt-and-peck typing technique that I've developed largely due to one finger that bends in an odd direction. (Ask me to make a fist with my right hand sometime.) I can't explain how it works and you'd never be able to follow along because I can't follow along myself, but I still manage to type about 55 wpm this way. Point being, on the netbook things just don't come out right. Programs get launched out of nowhere. The cursor bobs and weaves like Ali and often forgets where it's supposed to be. Like Ali.

Okay. That was mean. I'm riffing. Ride it out with me.

So there are all my excuses. Know what's hard to make excuses about, though? Writing stuff down on paper.

I don't want to ruin the suspense, but in a few moments I will make an excuse about it. In the meantime:

The first realization about my writing is that perhaps it's time to stop believing I need to be seated at the keyboard to write. My history belies the idea anyway. I wrote a lot of my fiction in the 90s in notebooks or journals, standing behind a convenience store counter. One of the best speeches in a pla I ever wrote was scribbled out on a yellow pad while sitting in a stairwell in a convention center in Chicago. I've done the pen-and-paper thing, of course. All writers have. I've just gotten away from it, and I have perhaps forgotten how much I always enjoyed the sheer visceral pleasure of it.

Writing is an act of binging and purging, of building up and tearing down in the name of constant refinement. It is liking and hating, often in the same sentence. And when you don't like it, you rip it out.

On a computer, "ripping it out" is relegated to highlighting and deleting. Or maybe the less-than-decisive CTRL+X...in case you're not sure. It's less definitive than the act of crossing out words and passages. And how you cross out says a lot about how you feel about your work. A single quick hashmark? Maybe you just didn't like that word much. You might like it later. Two or three scratch-outs and you've told that section that you never want to see it again...although maybe you'll call. Then you get down to the ink-based equivalent of a nuclear carpet-bombing where the strokes come so fast, thick and plentiful, the pen landing so violently that no amount of forensic work will ever reveal the crap you wrote in that last paragraph.

Computer deletion also usually removes the chance to go back and reconsider. You can CTRL-X once, but do it twice and the first one's gone. So do you start to keep a page of deleted passages? You could. But the written word, even with a few judgemental strokes through it, is something you can come back to. You could find the value in it that you hadn't seen before. It just waits there for you to decide.

In addition, when you've written something down on paper, in the act of transferring it into a Word doc you give yourself another pass at editing. It's unavoidable. You're considering every word that's lifting up from the page and shooting over to the keys. You will edit as you go. Therefore, you will improve as you go.

This is how I used to write.

This, I think, is how I should be writing.

A journal nearby to catch the words as they come. A pen at the ready. No booting up. No sweltering in the office. No excuse. Back in the moment, fielding thoughts like butterflies and pinning them down to use later. Writing without excuses.

If writing is life, then why am I choosing to live it so remotely? Thinking about going back to putting pen to paper, handwriting my work first, is like remembering an old friend I haven't thought to call. (People who know me personally will take a moment to savor the irony in that statement.)

And here's the writerly excuse moment.

Yesterday I went over to Barnes & Noble to buy a journal. To get the ball rolling. I had a lot of choices. Journals with printed covers. Leather. Spiral bound. Magnetic closure. Pithy quote on front. Embossed leaf. I picked up this one and that one, flipped them open, priced them out.

Here's the thing: None of them felt like the right one. I walked out without one.

Intellectually, I know it's just paper that I'm buying. Doesn't matter what the cover looks like or what it's made out of, right? Just needs to hold the ink in place for a while without ripping.

But it's more than that. It's this thing that's about to become an integral part of something that's integral to me. It needs to feel right, and I can't describe what that would constitute. I just know it wasn't on the shelves there.

I have a journal holder at home. It's lovely. Leather, embossed with a Celtic knot design and a Celtic-knot-style button that closes with a leather tie. My first wife gave it to me when I was writing sword & sorcery fiction in my 30s. I'm not writing sword & sorcery fiction now and although I know it doesn't really matter, it somehow does. I am not a Celtic knot sort of writer right now. I think I might look a bit odd at 48 hauling that one around. It would do the trick, I know. I know. It just isn't the one yet. But soon. I also have a couple partially filled journals I could use--but, like the holder, they're from before. They were given to a different writer. I need to redefine myself through my medium. I know it sounds hokey and I know it sounds like an excuse, but consider:

What I do, what all writers do, is intensely personal. All art is. From the very beginning of an act of art, it's about you and who you are and what you feel and believe and it's about your need to state that. Everything about that act should pull from that center. At my center, in that space that I feel I've been denying, I hear and see and feel the idea that this is what I need to do. That's truth. Honesty. The core of good art. Start from there and your work falls in line. Art without the artist's integral truth and honesty driving it forward is not art.

My hand already itches. I know it'll cramp up good on me. But it wants to hold a pen and write. It wants to scratch stuff out. It wants to write in the margins and doodle when it's blank. I intend to let it. Just as soon as I find the right book.


js