write right

Which do you prefer to write with? Keyboard or pen?

Over 2000 bloggers have signed up for NaBloPoMo so far. How many of us will answer this question on our sites today?

I’ve barely begun this marathon of committing my thoughts to digital bits daily and now I’m considering buying a composition book.

I used to write longhand. Man. I used to write.

It started in college with a special journal I wrote in every day for the first month or so of my freshman year. I recorded so faithfully everything that was happening to me that it began to feel like I was doing things in order to be able to write about them later. Which felt weird. So I stopped writing SO much. But still I wrote. A lot. I have boxes of journals from about 1987 through 1994. And then it switched to “Morning Pages” a la The Artist’s Way. Which kind of ruined journaling because suddenly it was about the “brain dump” and releasing anxiety rather than telling a story.

In 1992, when I was in a writing workshop with Maxine Hong Kingston, she asked us whom we were writing our journals for. It was a given that all 12 of us in the class kept journals.

“Yourselves!” she answered herself. Older versions of ourselves who would one day climb up into our attics, take the books out of boxes, dust them off, and revisit our younger selves.

A few years ago I decided to throw away the morning pages journals. I didn’t want to revisit that self again. And I felt the general weight of information overload. I wanted to let go of something. Cleanse.

I wonder what I’m going to do with the stories in this blog. It’s overwhelming to think of combing back through, finding the good stuff, maybe editing it down. I am reserving the right to delete this month’s daily blogging and voice-finding experiment.

Sometimes we delete things and sometimes we lose them in fires, floods, data crashes. Sometimes we let go and sometimes things are taken from us.

I vacillate between hoarding and shedding. Neither side of me is very fond of the other. But we coexist.

So, as I was saying, pen and paper became therapeutic tools at a certain point although I continued to also write creatively in longhand during graduate school and for a while after. The last solo theater piece I put together started out as a five hand-written pages in a yellow legal pad, the morning after Princess Diana died, which dates that fandango quite nicely.

When did I stop journaling altogether?

After graduate school, I kept journals only when I traveled, taping in the paper flotsam of tickets and cocktail napkins with insignia and such alongside postcards and menus and maps.

I wrote for newspapers for a while. Those pieces may have marked the beginning of my composing on the keyboard.

Is it possible that I barely wrote for myself again until I started blogging in 2007?

I participated in a writing group around 2005-6. That was longhand. And a few pieces generated from that group grew into a short story which I had published. So that was something.

But I never write a blog post longhand. It is part of the ritual to sit down, face the screen, tap the keys. It pours out. I barely edit. And then I click publish.

Maybe I stopped journaling because I didn’t want to store any more notebooks.

Will my writing be different if I put pen to paper again?

Yes.

But what is the point of a journal now that the writer can have an instant audience via so many media?

I have been invited to take the pen to paper very recently by more than one person in service of some more soul-searching type activities. The pen and the hand and arm engage the brain in a different way. I am resistant. I am out of practice. What will happen? What stories will my body tell? What if I write down a dream and there is no “save” button?

Who will hear it fall in the forest?