Wednesday, June 23, 2004 a pencil or a typwriter, or what
I was just looking at this poem I've been working on for a while, and I was at a dead end, so I did what idiots do, and I tried it in different fonts. I thought of the people who would bring things into creative writing classes that they'd put into novelty fonts, or where they'd centered all the lines. They are the ones who made me think that this was, indeed, what idiots do, because some of these former classmates had clearly put more time into presentation than they had into whatever it was they were presenting.
I think about it now, though, and I feel a little ashamed for reacting so negatively. In On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner wrote that the question he was asked most often at author Q&As was "Do you write with a pencil, a typewriter, or what?" He talks about it in a chapter near the end of the book, called "Faith." The way he saw it, the question wasn't an assinine waste of his time. Instead, it signified the uncertainty and suspicion that new writers feel, and that people weren't asking about pencils at all. They were asking if maybe there wasn't some series of voodoo tricks that one had to employ to make it.
I wish I'd been kinder, in general, in my writing classes. I was never vicious for the sake of being vicious, but there were days I harbored less love in my heart than I could have, and when I was really impatient with people for wasting class time that I saw as my own. That pulsating sense of entitlement was one of the things that ended up getting me through school, I think, but now that I'm a thousand years old and totally mellow, I think that I should have probably just relaxed.
I was so serious, though, and I was so scared. I hated the idea that somebody who thought it made sense to put an entire short story in the comic sans font might, in any situation, know a single thing more than I did about putting a story together.
I can't imagine writing before the rise of the word processor, let alone the ballpoint pen, but then, too, I appreciate how it helps, sometimes to make things more difficult for oneself. There have been times when I've had to use a pen and paper, even though my own handwriting is painfully bad and slow. If write fast enough for storytelling on paper to be practical, my handwriting is barely legible, and in that way I can move on even if I've written something down in a stupid, clumsy way, because it takes a second to decode the penmanship.
The problems with the poem stayed just as bad as ever, no matter what font. Maybe next I'll try centering it on the page, or adding ridiculous clip art. My new benevolent outlook allows me to realize that this is all truly productive and part of the creative process, and that I am not just being an a-hole.
posted by Frenz | 6/23/2004 03:08:00 AM
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