by Warren Adler via IndieReader
An idea storms your consciousness. You scramble to jot it down before it dissipates. What do you reach for? Do you type that brilliant line of dialogue on your phone or do you reach for your trusty notepad? If so, what kind of notebook is it? Are the pages lined or blank? Do you jot down the sentence with a pen or pencil?
Every writer knows the importance of a writing tool. It's one step in the process of how our words see daylight. A trusted writing companion isn't just someone who can read over a third or fourth draft. It's your computer in the corner of your room, in your suitcase, or even in your windowless basement, if your writing space is anything like mine was decades ago. Your writing companions are the pen and paper whose ink flows in time to your words.
"How do you write, meaning pen, pencil, typewriter or computer?" is one of the top three questions I receive on a daily basis. It's a question that gets on a very intimate level with a writer. What happens when it is just the writer alone with his or her work? What tools are used when honing one's craft? Our imagination needs an outlet, which nowadays has technological guidance behind it.
One Letter at a Time
How much of pacing and tempo in our writing has to do with the tool we are using to record them? Sometimes my thoughts come to me at such lightning speed that the only way to catch each word is by tapping my fingers against the keyboard in an effort to match it.
Speaking of which, I like a noisy keyboard. The kind which makes each letter resonate. It reminds me of my old and clunky Remington typewriter. A pen and paper during those moments would only slow me down. Hand cramps would also inevitably occur. Other writers prefer the flat and virtually silent keyboards created by Apple. The rhythm at which we write is an undefinable element in the work we create.
Is Time on Your Side?
Does your writing tool save you precious time? Time that could be otherwise spent working on a second draft? Writing novels by both manual and electric typewriters was a tremendously time consuming and expensive process. I am an inveterate and habitual re-writer. My drafts in those days were always full of corrections and had to be typed and retyped ad infinitum. I kept a series of freelance secretaries busy cleaning up my manuscripts for submission.
Know thy Handwriting
My first attempt at a long-form story was a blotchy mess on lined paper in a black notebook with a speckled cover. Even in my teens, I was a prodigious re-writer and my earliest efforts were barely legible even to me. My penmanship was lousy and cursive handwriting was not my strongest suit. Illegible handwriting can make re-reading and working on your drafts a longer and more strenuous task than it has to be.
No Room for Fear
Technological advancements used to scare me. I think I resisted the opportunity to go electric because I feared that somehow the use of a strange alien tool might slow down my creative juices. The computer was a totally foreign tool and after much soul searching I finally took the plunge. The program I used was Wordstar, long gone. My printer could spit out no more than four pages a minute. Nevertheless, I persevered, largely on the common fact that I would be able to make my corrections immediately and not need endless retyping by a secretary.
In my mid-forties, I set up my writing studio in the basement of my then suburban split level and pounded away all throughout my business career, writing early in the morning, then going off to work. By then, my principal fear was that a breakdown of my electric typewriter would force me to put it in the shop and deprive me of my writing tool for who knew how long. Now I turn on my computer every morning at 5 am, and barely give it a second thought. I have grown attached to the ease at which I can type out pages in a novel or a blog post.
Although I missed the sound of my fingertips tapping the keys and missed the smell of the ink ribbon and the paper, I learned that it made no difference. In fact, I think the computer actually allowed my creative juices to flow more freely.
I haven't used any writing apps in my writing career. I'm very interested in what they can do for a writer, but not for me personally. What could they offer as tools that our imagination and perseverance haven't already?
No Write or Wrong Tool
On all these devices, using all of these tools, I have written more than 55 novels, hundreds of short stories, a number of plays and a never-ending gaggle of blogs like this one. There's no right or wrong writing tool. I've known writers to scramble and jot down ideas on napkins, post-its, even on their hands. What matters is the words which remain once the ink dries.
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Warren Adler's novel, Torture Man, was released last month. His film/TV projects include the sequel to his The War of the Roses - The War of the Roses: The Children, along with other projects including Capitol Crimes, a television series based his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery novels, as well as a feature film based on Adler and James Humes' WWII thriller, Target Churchill.
Adler has just launched Writers of the World, an online community for writers to share their stories about why they began writing. Explore more at www.warrenadler.com
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