Wednesday's Words 3

I can't count the number of times my mind has brought back the memory of high school English class as justification for some wonky aspect of my writing or my methods of writing. Why am I still doing that? Today I'm thinking specifically of a time when my teacher was discussing what he felt was the great tragedy of the modern age: word processors eliminated the draft's existence. He sited examples of hand written manuscripts from Shakespeare or the idea that the change the text underwent would be lost. At the time, my head was empty of ideas and this one sounded like a solid one. I swore to myself that I'd forever write in ink so that I'd always have my original unedited piece of writing. I insisted on handwriting everything, so that my drafts would be preserved. Later on in college I decided that my brain thought quicker than my hand could move with a pen, so I needed a new method of writing. I sought out type writers, figuring this would somehow be a bargain between the speed of typing and a permanent record. Turns out they are a pain in the ass to use for the most part. Their novelty quickly wears off when you've made another typo and have no choice but to cross out a word and retype it for the sentence to make sense.

I'm not sure why I stuck with that for so long. I guess I never really questioned the idea that writing by hand was a better method of writing for me. I type somewhere between 70-100 words per minute, depending largely on my caffeine intake. There is just no way my hand can move that fast. Every essay I ever wrote was done electronically and never once did I hand write a draft to any of them. It doesn't make much sense for me to keep at that strict analog only writing method.

I think this comes back to giving myself the time to write again. That ever present issue I cause myself , needing to dedicate time to a skill rather than be empowered by some magical force that just uses me as a conduit to spew greatness into the world. Hopelessly romantic ideas about what writing is meant to be. I can't hold on to those ideas if I really expect to make any progress. I just need to keep reminding myself that changing an idea is not an admission of defeat.