My love affair with spirals
Notebooks that is. 
Sorry, not a love scene from one of my books. Though I did write a lot of sex today. But that’s a rabbit trail off the main path of this blog. I thought about what I had written yesterday and realized I didn’t have it exactly right. I can jump into a story pretty much wherever my brain has worked through a scene, but not on the computer. For some reason, when I type, it’s got to be “in order”. In my mind, those words echo with pompous authority the way a large and ancient bell tolls the hour for beginning classes across the lawn of a strict, Ivy-league prep school where all the students are required to wear suit coats and of course the hallowed halls are empty because tardiness is not allowed.
Wow. I’m really wanting to dart down those darn rabbit trails.
Anyway, I can’t type out of order. Maybe because rough drafts for me, lists of ideas, random wanderings, all fit more naturally onto paper. Where if I scratch it out, I can come back to it and see it, gather up the direction of inspiration, the starts and stops and AH HA’s!! even weeks or years from the day of writing. Arrows and stars and brackets and doodles all meander easily across a piece of notebook paper for me. But on a keyboard with electronic letters and delete, save, print – it’s gone, done, finished – even with the multitude of fonts available – it’s just not the same.
It’s not MY writing. I can look at something I wrote weeks ago and tell by the slant and shape of the letters what kind of mood I was in. From the complexity and number of doodles just how long it took me to pull a thought from my head in a manner precise and narrow enough for words. And I like to see my work spread out. I do a lot of flipping back and forth, moving whole scenes, descriptions, conflicts, paragraphs, and descriptions around. When I try to do that on the computer, I get confused because I don’t have the visual clues that I do on my handwritten pages. There’s no blue star with a number one in the margin and a note to call mom before the NCAA championship game starts (because of course, she won’t answer when the game is actually being played.) No coffee spill on page 62 or half-written poem along the margin where the scene being played out sparked inspiration for several other stories.
The computer is wonderful. I absolutely would NOT want to live a life in today’s world without it. It makes so many things faster and easier. (And in my notebooks, let’s face it – as much as I love them, they DON’T automatically correct my spelling when I’m rushing and forget the “i before e except after c” rule among others.) But there’s something about seeing words formed by your own hand that just draws me, entrances me. Keeps me reaching for that notebook one more time. When I hit a writing block, 9 times out of 10, I’m sitting at the computer. And 9 times out of 10, all I have to do is shut it down, grab a spiral and a colored pen, take a deep breath and dive into that clear, inviting page that’s been waiting on me.
