A few weeks back, I finished my fourth short-story draft for the year and submitted it to an open call before startingstory number five.
Writing’s an uphill battle at the moment because the world–once again–is trending towards chaos and laying disruptions in my path. After spending the first six months of my new job training myself to write on buses, we’ve now got a global fuel crisis looming and my regular public transport became standing room only.
I will not lie: I didn’t handle this well at first. I grumped and railed at the unfairness of it all, and cursed the inability to break my laptop out and push forward on various projects. I spent March engaged in a kind of writerly petulance, telling myself (and anyone else who would listen) that everything felt hopeless.
I wrote very little over the last few weeks, and it frustrated me.
Then I hit my limit on wallowing. I picked a small target–writing a flash fiction for an upcoming opportunity–and experimented with ways of getting words down.
In doing so, I turned to a piece of technology ordinarily regarded as the writer’s nemesis: my phone.
The Hardest Lesson: Thumbing Words Into A Google Doc Doesn’t Feel Like Writing, But It Is
After spending the last twelve months working in all-in-one Scrivener workbench, I migrated all my active projects into Google Docs. It’s an option that gives me the one feature I really love from Scrivener – damn near constant autosave – but opened up the possibility of moving seamlessly from desktop to laptop to tablet to phone.
And right now, my phone is a damn good option for getting words down on a crowded phone.
Tapping stories out with my thumbs on a phone keyboard isn’t as quick as typing or handwriting, and it feels like sacrilege to call it “writing” because it’s so foreign to the way I work. I “type” into a phone at about half the speed and make considerably more typos than i do when touch-typing.
But what it does is get words down, because there are damn few circumstances where it’s impossible to pull out my phone. Thumbing out 250 words of a story is a far better use of my commute time than scanning Facebook or doomscrolling the news.
I figured it would take me forever to get anything written, which is one reason I focused on clearing a 1,000-word story by end of week.
Hitting that would be a big win after all the wallowing and gnashing of teeth.
Getting something done would be a decent consolation prize.
To my surprise, I wrote 3,000 words this week
I finished my story draft, but actually wrote half a second story that was set aside because i knew it would blow past the word count for this submission. It’s waiting in the wings, ready to become the project du jour after I finish editing the fourth story down.
This burst of productivity wasn’t entirely phone driven – today, I experimented with catching a different set of buses to work, and while they add 20 minutes to my commute, both legs of it were on blissfully empty vehicles that allowed me to bust out the laptop and work interrupted
I’m still crediting my phone with the assist on those words, though. Picking up speed at the end of the week was bliss, but it wouldn’t have happened without the phone springs getting me into my current projects.
Projects build momentum when you work on them, and even the small bits of writing i did on the phone put me in the headspace where I was excited to write again. I found myself looking for more gaps where I could get a few words in.
I even squeezed in an evening writing session – something I’ve only done a handful of times since starting the day job (and Cthulhu knows I’ve been lamenting that, so it was nice to carve out that time).
And now I’m up in the wee hours of the morning, doing my newsletter work before the rest of the house rises. Not something I’m likely to do from a cold start, but easy to convince myself to do when my writing process is already in motion.
All of this is just the latest iteration of an ongoing process
I’m doing the same thing I did six months ago, looking at what’s possible instead of feeling trapped. If the laptop isn’t workable and notebooks are impractical, why not use the phone as the next iteration of my process?
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how far I could take this mode of working. Bullet Journal creator Ryder Carrol recently did a video about using his phone as a primary work station when on the move, rather than carting around a laptop.
He invested in a stand and a spare Apple keyboard, and his iPhone became the primary writing tool that was lighter and easier to transport than a laptop or tablet. It also meant engaging with his work on a small screen–a boon, given many of us now read on those same screens.
I’m intrigued. Not only because it’s a lot less to cart around than my current set-up, but because I can see how it will both reduce the friction when I write and further transform the phone into a tool rather than a distraction.
It might not be how I’d prefer to work, but these are interesting times, and I’m trying not the ideal prevent me from making progress. And I find myself thinking of Jeff VanderMeer’s notion of abandoning the fetishes of process:.
“I’m for whatever creates the least distance between thought and capturing the thought, that provides the least friction between “eureka!” and writing down “eureka!” before it becomes “What the heck was that brilliant phrase I was just thinking of a second ago and now have forgotten?”
My younger self didn’t understand this truth. My younger self kept putting obstacles between me and the act of writing. Every minute spent fetishizing the process instead of simplifying it cost me moments of creativity. (VanderMeer, Jeff. Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer).
Given I’ve had multiple conversations about pen and notebook preferences in the last week, and I’m looking forward to a friend’s updates about falling into the world of Japanese stationery and fountain pens, I’m obviously someone who likes a good writing fetish.
When presented with a choice, I wouldn’t write on my phone. Nor would I use Google Docs–a software that is just unintuitive enough that I find it frustrating on many levels. Given the choice, I’d be handwriting books in nice notebooks with good quality pens for hours of the day.
Given the choice, I’d do a lot of things.
Thing is, I enjoy getting stories out into the world far more than I like my fetishes process, and thus far my ramshackle “solve the next problem” approach is adding up. The last time I had four stories on submission at the same time was back in 2012, and while I’m submitting a little slower than I’d like, I can feel the inertial of the last few years giving way to forward momentum and little wins.
Leave a Reply