From Quill to Keyboard Read online

still have a fat and rather useless Mont Blanc pen which still leaks even after a trip all the way to Switzerland for repairs and whose tank is ridiculously inadequate for its size even when I can find a bottle of the right ink to feed it with.

  Imagine how it was to write those great long Victorian novels with only a dip-pen. Or what about those writers even earlier who had to sharpen and trim their own quills. Such doggedness! Such determination! Such inky fingers!

  But yes, writing by hand did help us to think. Gathering thoughts when beginning a writing task is a bit like plucking sheep’s wool off a barbed wire fence - you can fill a bale eventually but it’s slow, painstaking work. You start with a tuft or two and hunt for a few more to make a handful, but sometimes you get discouraged way before you have enough for a cushion, let alone a bale, because the material begins to seem unpromising and the effort hardly worthwhile. Beginners often give up because they don’t have the experience, or the volume of successful work behind them, to give them confidence that they can do it. Older hands keep going.

  Before computers it was easier to write those isolated ideas down on paper which could be added to, moved around, cut up and pasted onto other bits of paper. Each lonely scrap of a thought could be joined to another, and the very act of writing them down made you feel that you were making progress. And each tentative conjunction could trigger another thought, another direction, until you began to see a hazy pattern through what had so far appeared random.

  To do this kind of preliminary work on a typewriter always seemed tedious and time-consuming, and in the end pointless. The machine sat there on the desk, businesslike and brisk, ready to do its job. It was uncompromising. It was what it was. It did its job perfectly well but there was no room for manoeuvre. It was too definite, too premature for the shaky, uncertain creature floundering around trying to work out what he was trying to say, let alone how he was going to say it.

  As we sat around the table that morning thinking about the process of thinking about writing, we realised that we did eventually get our work typed and sent away. At what point did we decide that we were ready to do that?

  It was pretty much the same for all of us. At some point during the drafting and patching and rewriting, quite suddenly, the slowness and deliberation was too slow and deliberate. We would abandon the draft in mid-sentence and leap for the typewriter, impatient to get on with the next stage.

  For me, the sudden impatience happened at that moment when I stopped wondering what I wanted to say and how to say it. The moment when I knew deep down that I had the matter licked. The moment I knew where I was going and how to get there. There was a surge of confidence and a certainty of purpose that was unmistakable.

  This did not mean that the first typewriter draft was necessarily the last. It still needed tinkering and careful evaluation, and eventually a proper, clean, well-presented final version could result. But it was recognisably a coherent entity, with shape and substance, light and colour. Most of the hard work had been done - the gathering and thinking and scribbling and experimenting.

  Computers have changed all this. They have without doubt made it so much easier to do all these things at once, on the keyboard. Except for our friend who still thinks with a pen in his hand, we all leap straight for the keyboard and bypass the tedious bits. It still means we have to go through the same old processes (which get easier with practice) but our wastepaper baskets remain relatively empty, our pens remain unchewed, and all our thoughts are captured the moment we think them, and remain instantly available until we choose to employ them.

  As for quills, I have a large pot full of seagull feathers on top of my bookcase in case I need them for dashing off dramatic ink-and-wash drawings. However, I have never been tempted to write with them.

  WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?

  Nobody said that writing was easy, except people who don’t write. It is easy, in that most of us can write a letter or an email or a note inside a Christmas card. That piece of paper is not at all threatening, this pen is simply a tool.

  But writing, as in creating an original poem or story or article out of thin air, making something where there was nothing - that kind of writing is not at all easy. Ask any writer. The chances are that they will tell you that no matter how many years they have been doing it, they nearly always begin a writing task from square one, with all the reluctance, doubts and anxieties that go with it.

  I believe that it was probably a writer who invented procrastination. What am I going to write about? Will it be a poem or a story? Where shall I start? Why can’t I think of any ideas? Who is going to read it? Is it worth doing? Perhaps I should leave it until tomorrow, when I’ve had a good night’s sleep. Or when this headache’s gone. Maybe I’ll go and see if the postman’s been. I really should telephone Mum. Maybe an idea will just pop into my mind.

  Do you really think writing gets done this way?

  As Dr Samuel Johnson said, “nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome”. I recently read a book by John Curran about the notebooks of the late, great Queen of Crime Agatha Christie. More than seventy exercise books were found after she died, and they were packed with scribbles about characters, plots, questions and ideas.

  Dame Agatha knew how to write books. There were more than eighty of them, and she wrote plays and short stories as well. Those notebooks show how messy, apparently random jottings started the process of developing into the meticulous plotting that was the hallmark of the Christie style of writing about murder.

  Curran has worked out that you could read a different Christie title every month for almost seven years, and watch a different Christie play every month for two years. I very much doubt if Dame Agatha wasted her time fussing about headaches or the postman. She scribbled, and the more she scribbled, the more ideas popped into her head. She scribbled so fast that the handwriting is hard to read, and she could hardly keep up with the ideas that teemed around in that fertile brain.

  The ideas became books and plays and stories, because that’s how writers write, by writing. We can all learn a lot from this. Dame Agatha’s particular method is not everybody’s, but the principle applies: in order to write, it is necessary to write. It is not necessary, or desirable, or useful, or sensible, to wait for some more propitious moment than right now. You are not going to have better ideas if you put off the job. There is no point in waiting for inspiration unless, like Somerset Maugham, you arrange for inspiration to strike at nine o’clock every morning. There is no advantage in trying to decide who is going to read it if you haven’t written it yet, whatever ‘it’ is.

  There is only one thing to do. You must sit down and start - now.

  The strange thing is that when you start, you can keep going. As with Dame Agatha, the ideas start forming themselves, and they keep coming. The more you write, the more ideas you have to accommodate in that brain, and the more ideas you have, the more eager you will be to get them down somehow. It becomes a pleasure, the kind of pleasure that comes from a sense of achievement and fulfilment.

  In her novel The Bradshaw Variations, Rachel Cusk created a character who typifies all those of us who have ever been wannabes: a would-be artist who is constantly moaning about not being able to find the time for painting. In spite of every opportunity to go down to her specially built studio at the end of the garden, and every encouragement from her enthusiastic and supportive husband, she somehow never gets around to it. There is nothing and no one to stop her.

  So - what’s stopping you?

  FOR LOVE OR MONEY?

  There are plenty of reasons for writing. At the simplest level we write to communicate something - messages, instructions, information. We write to maintain contact with people - letters and emails, press releases, advertising copy, newsletters. We write to please ourselves - in our journals, poetry. And sometimes we write to please and entertain others - in newspapers, magazines and books, for the radio, television, the stage and the mov
ies.

  The question eventually arises: do we write for love or money?

  Some of us are writers by trade - that is our job description. We even have a business industry classification for tax purposes. We are not plumbers or secretaries who write for fun, although there are people who fall into that category. We fill in that box on forms marked occupation with “writer” or “journalist” or “novelist” or “poet”.

  It stands to reason that if we have an occupation, we should be paid for it. How else are we to live? Some of us are paid by organisations like newspapers and magazines. We are on the staff, with desks and telephones and coffee breaks and maybe even company cars, like real workers.

  Some of us are freelancers. We work from home, and we must find work wherever we can, or create it from out of our heads - which can, it must be said, sometimes feel like thin air.

  Those of us who are self-employed writers are often quite busy not writing at all. We are out entertaining people. We are called upon to talk to interested groups. We judge competitions; we sit on panels; we take part in seminars. In short we perform, and we do so in our professional capacity - as writers. And often we do so for no more than a little present - a token and a