The Right Way to Write

I have friends who own a dozen pretty notebooks they’ve never written in because a pretty notebook should be used for something special, but they write like a house on fire in a college-ruled spiral notebook. I know people who can only work on computer. There are people out there who can only write at a typewriter. I know persons of amazing and enviable focus who can write anywhere, on anything, no matter what is happening around them.

Unsurprisingly, these persons write a lot more than I do.

But I can write in pretty notebooks and leather-bound journals that shout “adventure!” I write in composition books and spiral notebooks and legal pads, on index cards and mirrors and windows… It’s a wonderful eclecticism, but there’s a slight problem. Just a tiny catch–

Sometimes if I want to get anywhere, I need to write on/with the RIGHT thing for what I’m trying to do. I can bang my head against a metaphorical wall all day and get three paragraphs that I hate, or I can find the right medium and write like that burning house I mentioned up there.

Or, third option, I could spend all day trying to find the “right” medium and not get anything at all done. It’s always a gamble.

Once I could not get into the head of a privileged, snooty character. I tried on my little old IBM XT in my writing room. I tried in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table. I tried on my electric typewriter in my bedroom. I tried on a legal pad in the hammock out back. Finally I switched to one of those fancy journals people always give writers (don’t stop!) and pulled out the fanciest pen I owned. And I wrote this woman talking down to Ben, smug and condescending as you please. Perfect.

Unfortunately it’s not always that easy.† Why some scenes will flow better written on a legal pad than in a spiral notebook, I don’t know. Why sometimes I can type happily away on my desktop, but other times I have to take my netbook to the living room (or even McDonalds) I don’t know. It’s just how it is.

Above my head at my desk I have a fancy notebook, a simple but small notebook, a composition book, and a leather-bound journal with no lines on the dark-cream pages. To my left are a spiral-bound notebook, a legal pad, and a stack of post-its. I have black pens and red pens and blue pens, gel pens and crayons and colored pencils and drawing pencils. I have a desktop, a laptop, and a netbook. For plotting I have a bulletin board and index cards, Scrivener, and dry-erase marker on mirror. (Try it.)

Last night none of that wanted to work, so I taped aluminum foil to my sliding glass door and plotted on it with Sharpie markers. It has the extra benefit of blocking some of the sun streaming into my east-facing room the morning after I stayed up too late fighting with plot.

Whatever works, man. Whatever works.

†I say easy now, because it seems obvious that my best materials would help me write a privileged character. Then, though–it took me all day to come up with that!