Notebook Week

I’ve fired up the laptop for the first time in three days and find myself slightly baffled over how to make my brain work in concert with a keyboard. I’m immersed in redrafts this week, kicking the tyres on a couple of novellas, and I’ve switched up my usual process by doing the rewrites by hand instead of glaring at the computer screen. The process I outlined on Monday proved significantly useful that I’ve stuck with it for the bulk of the week – get out, find a nook or cranny to hide in, scribble a few words before tramping my notebook to the next spot.

It’s been a while since I’ve drafted in handwriting alone, and as always I’m kinda surprised by how efficient it is. The work doesn’t look finished when it’s done – nowhere near – but I suspect that’s a feature rather than a flaw. The inability to delete and tinker with a line means I have to keep moving forward, and twice as much work gets done in half the time on the drafting front. Plus, a boatload more exercise and engagement with the world, which is not a thing to sneeze at.

The current project du jour is one of the novellas I’m writing for my thesis: science fiction, hard-boiled, claustrophobic. I’m closing off the first act today, having just taken my protagonist out of her comfort zone via a quick trip to the local museum, and I’m building towards the bit that I’m looking forward too where there will be knife fights and running around in the dark and oh so many betrayals.

The nice part about working in notebooks, as ever, is the way the work feels tangible. Word processors try to give the day’s work weight through the application of numbers–you have written this many words, bro–but the pages feel like work. It feels more meaningful to fill one and move on, and I can settle into a comfortable pace without tracking and calculating how fast I’m going or highlighting chunks of text to figure out how many words are in the current chapter. Notebooks also lend themselves to thinking out loud, setting aside a page to think through a stick point or try alternative models, which keeps everything nicely condensed.

Of course, I have written about all of this before, just as I am conscious of the flaws of this particular approach. As I noted last time:

You know what’s great about notebooks? They’re not connected to WiFi. You can’t check Facebook. You sure as hell can’t update Twitter or check or your email or search Wikipedia for answers to a research query. Your choices are literally forward momentum or staring at a blank page.

You know what sucks about notebooks? Sometimes you need to do that other shit.

The creative side of the writing is about five-sixths of the job, but the rest involves a certain measure of treating your business like a business and being a goddamn professional. Responding to email in a timely manner is part of that, especially when you’re working on collaborate projects or working with an editor/publisher.

The End of the Notebook Experiment

A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jul 9, 2018 at 5:30pm PDT