December Daily: longhand

[resonant]

isis and clevermanka and trobadora - longhand?!

When I mentioned that I compose all my stories in longhand, that got a lot of surprised responses.

I don't really understand why I have so much trouble composing fiction onscreen. I can write a blog entry onscreen. At work a good chunk of my job is writing legal documents onscreen and i have no difficulty with that. (Though suddenly it occurs to me that if I know I'm going to be writing for the next chunk of time, I'll often listen to an ASMR video or a "rainy cafe noise" soundtrack, even if I'm at home with no distractions; wonder if that's related?)

I think one of my difficulties is that words on a screen look so finished. It's inhibiting.







This is pre-first draft -- it's the phase where ideas are coming to me and I'm jotting them down any old way. I might get entire scenes, I might get snatches of dialog, I might have notes that say things like HELP IF HE STOPS ASKING HOW DO I MAKE HIM START AGAIN?

Eventually the whole thing will start to stick together in larger clumps (feels like making pie crust) and I'll begin to have numbers in circles and arrows and crossed-out pages and scenes that stop in the middle with notes that say NO WAIT THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN BEFORE THE TAPE MEASURE SWORDFIGHT -- it's a mess.

And it hurts my wrist. But then so does typing.

I don't exactly do it because it's good; I do it because I don't seem to be capable of doing it any other way. But it does have advantages:

- Typing it up becomes a second draft, an easy opportunity to catch excessive adverbs, overuse of the characters' names in dialog, 'whisper' and 'flushed' and 'minute' and 'a little bit' and other things I write and then have to unwrite.

- I'm wordy in general, and in particular in sex scenes I have to write a substantial amount of it before it tells me what it wants to be about. The typing stage is a good opportunity to look at five paragraphs of unbuttonining buttons and say, "I'm not gonna type all that. It's boring anyway."

- Writing in order doesn't work very well for me, for some reason -- things get boring and stodgy. It works better if I write the scene I'm enthusiastic about, and then do the assembly later.

- I like my handwriting. I used to have terrible handwriting, and back in the ninth grade I literally spent all summer long laboriously working out new letterforms and practicing them over and over. That means that every letter I write is a reminder of a time when I combined creativity with persistence to make something I'm proud of -- a good thing to have in your mind when you're doing the inevitable bad writing that's necessary to create good writing!

(If you're wondering, what you're looking at is the only writing project that currently has any energy, and it's a ridiculous one: it's a story in The Adventure Zone: Amnesty in which Beacon the sword gets temporarily turned into a human being. I know. I know.)




Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.



15. china_shop - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
16. kiezh following up with - "What have you heard about MDZS/The Untamed, and what did you think of what you heard?"
17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
21. hypertwink - "21. Now that you've come back, is there a fandom that you want to dip your toe into? (Follow up: Are you apprehensive/excited about it?)"
22.
23.
24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
25.
26. ride4ever - "for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020."
27. reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"
28.
29.
30.
31.









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Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

Writing in order doesn't work very well for me, for some reason -- things get boring and stodgy. It works better if I write the scene I'm enthusiastic about, and then do the assembly later.

Heh, this is reason #1 why I haven't been able to do longhand in a million years since taking to the computer. :) For me, it's so much easier to have everything in order in the file, but leave gaps and notes that I can come back later and fill in. And rearranging bits by digital cut-and-paste. (The one exception is that sometimes if I'm rearranging a LOT of material, I want to see more than a screen's worth at once. I have occasionally resorted to printing out and doing literal cut-and-rearrange on the floor, until I get the text in the order I want and can go back to rearrange it to match in the file.)

[ellen_fremedon]

That's fascinating! I would have said exactly the opposite--that words on a screen are completely fluid, but once you make them physical you can't change them.

I did a card exchange this month with people from one of my Les Mis discords and almost had a panic attack when I had to write a message on the card--a nice one! that I had spent money on! And now I had to write on it in INK and WHAT IF I MESSED IT UP?!

I can't even imaging trying to draft fiction with that level of pressure.

[castiron]

I have the same thing with words on paper vs. words on a screen. You'd think it'd be the other way around, that the words on a screen would feel less fixed because they're really easy to change, while the handwritten words would feel more fixed, but no. Maybe it's because I do so much of my reading on screens rather than on paper these days. Or maybe it's that I used to write a lot of scenes on the back side of paper filched from the recycle bin at work -- it's hard to feel like something scrawled on the back of a printed spreadsheet is the final form of the work. Now even when I write a scene in a notebook, it still feels like a draft, not the Real Thing.

Sometimes I can trick myself into drafting on the computer by having two files for a story, one that's for the Real Story, with the actual scenes in order, and one that's called "crap that might go in STORY", with all sorts of random out-of-order stuff. That worked really well for me back when I wrote Not Yet Dead.

[clevermanka]

"How am I gonna be able to wield you when I know what it feels like to hurt you"
ok but that line tho, wow.

[krait]

I see! I think I have a similar inclination, just coming from the opposite angle: on a screen, the backspace button is a second away, while on paper deletion is more difficult; ergo digital words are temporary and unfinished, while analog words are permanent.

[trobadora]

I think one of my difficulties is that words on a screen look so finished.

Huh. The ease of c&p-ing things around, and deleting and rewriting and everything, makes words on a screen feel way more malleable to me than handwritten words. I'm an extremely nonlinear writer too - if I try to write linearly I get stuck; I can barely write a paragraph without jumping around during - and typing makes it so much easier for me.

I used to have terrible handwriting, and back in the ninth grade I literally spent all summer long laboriously working out new letterforms and practicing them over and over.

Oh, how interesting, I did that too! Except afterwards my handwriting degraded again, and it's as terrible now as it was before, just differently terrible. *g* (I can still write nicely, it just takes more focus than I'm normally willing to expend.)

You do have very pretty handwriting!

[laurenthemself]

Your handwriting is great!

[celli]

That is so awesome. :)

[spacetimeconundrum]

When I was much younger I used to have the same issue with composing on the computer, so I tended to write any stories or school essay assignments out by hand and type them up later. Now though, I do almost all of my writing straight into the computer, with the only exception being I'll occasionally write little notes to myself if I have an idea and I'm not somewhere I can type it up just then (and really there are dozens of such notes on my phone, so usually those fleeting thoughts get recorded digitally as well).

Weirdly, the thing I think that made me switch over from handwritten to typed composition was in high school and college I spent a lot of time playing an online text adventure game, which both improved my typing speed and made me much more comfortable with instantaneously translating thoughts onto a screen via the keyboard.

Also, as others have commented, I find it's much easier to erase or rearrange your words when they're not on paper. (A similar transition is/has happened for me re: traditional vs digital art, where I now do so much more with a tablet pen than a pencil.) But really there's no single correct way to go through the creative process, so if it works for you, definitely keep doing it!

[fox]

I love your handwriting!

[lunabee34]

Your penmanship is indeed quite lovely. *admires*

[jesse_the_k]

I am very impressed by your handwriting!

If you get tired of the law and writing, you could go back in time and be an engrossing clerk.

[resonant]

Oh, man, when I was working on The Teeth of the Hydra, with its alternating past and present scenes, I printed out all the scenes separately and spread them out on the living room floor trying to put them in an order that made sense.

[resonant]

I was a church secretary for a while, and the church had a computer system, of course, but it was also required to keep congregational records (births, deaths, marriages, etc.) in a giant, fancy, red book. You couldn't add or subtract pages, and you couldn't take them out and run them through a printer and put them back in; they were bound in, and you had to write out the names and the dates.

Eventually I got to the point where I liked the task -- it felt like arts and crafts -- but it was very intimidating at first.

Cool, though, to be able to see the handwriting of the secretaries before me, back into the 1800s with their spidery fine-nibbed fountain pens and their brownish ink.

[resonant]

I know the words on the screen are easy to change, but they look so permanent.

Sadly, it's probably the same impulse that makes many of my generation believe all kinds of conspiracy theories because if it wasn't true that there were microchips in your autism vaccine, "they" wouldn't let them put it on the internet.

[resonant]

<3s you with so many <3s

[resonant]

As I reply to these comments, I begin to wonder whether it's generational. I'm older than rocks fandom, and my childhood impression of printed matter was that it was so expensive to create it that it must be important and reliable. I'll bet people who grew up with color printers in their houses feel very differently about things that are in print.

[resonant]

One or another of my aunts very cleverly gave me a calligraphy set while I was out of school for the summer. That has to be one of the best gifts of all time.

[resonant]

Thanks. It's a pleasure for me.

[resonant]

One of the results of it is that I write sex scenes without identifiable sex words, because, again, I'm always feeling like somebody in the coffee shop of Barnes & Noble is going to look over my shoulder and somehow be able to read that tiny print.

[resonant]

Oh, I have a phone full of notes, too. And when I used to go to work, I would email notes to myself from my work computer. Just ideas everywhere.

[resonant]

Thanks! I have very specific taste in spiral notebooks and mechanical pencils, too.

[resonant]

Thanks! I own a calligraphy pen, but I hardly ever use it. It might be fun to get back into that.

[resonant]

Can you imagine copying letters all day like Bob Cratchit?

[lunabee34]

I have a Pilot Parallel calligraphy pen, and I love writing with it.

[krait]

That's an interesting notion! I'm sort of on the edge of the generational curve, there.

Our very first printer was a beige dot-matrix printer of the sort that used paper with little detachable strips of holes down both sides. :D I don't recall how old I was when we got it, but possibly around 8 or 10?

Our first computer ran DOS as an operating system and was top-of-the-line with 8 MB of RAM (tell kids these days that and they'll think you're making it up; that's not enough to run the calculator, these days). I fondly remember typing up some homework in WordPerfect and feeling very grown-up!

We had some kind of 'educational' software program that was for making stories, with clip art you could move around and add text to, which I remember having a lot of fun with. (There were a lot of aliens in my stories. I must have really liked the alien picture.) I don't think I printed most of them, though, and I don't remember whether color was an option; they might have been black-and-white, or possibly in outline like a coloring book? But it probably did have some effect on my understanding of both "stories" and "printed materials" and the permanence thereof! Maybe not any more than kids who got given their parents' old printouts or work materials to draw on, though.

Kids who grew up with magazines and newspapers, which are kept only a few days or weeks, might be more inclined to see printed materials as ephemeral, too.