Very often, when I’m writing, I’ll start with a pen and paper. Typing on a screen isn’t my favourite, it doesn’t feel as private. I’ve tried to make myself sit at a desk and type on my laptop, but more often than not I’ll end up sitting on my bed with a large hard backed notebook balancing awkwardly on my knee, skipping the last five lines on the page to prevent the hard edge from sticking into my stomach.
The paper has to have a certain thickness, and I have a preference for black gel pens. Blue biro on thin paper just isn’t the same. I wonder if this is a part of older age, as there are boxes of blue biro on thin paper hidden in the bottom of my wardrobe, the traces of pre-digital adolescence.
I like to check the pen I’m using to see how much ink I’ve gotten through, how close I am to adding it to the box of empties for recycling. This isn’t the most logical manner of gauging my progress. I use up pen after pen without completing any short stories to the point where they could be submitted to a magazine. But there is a very particular satisfaction in finishing another pen, and not finishing another story, though the A4 notebooks are piling up in the wardrobe. Nothing gets over the line. Maybe it’s not time yet?
I spent the summer writing and rewriting, beginning the same story again and again and again, written out by hand in the notebooks I buy in bulk, with the extra narrow lines, more space for writing. I finish another of these thick notebooks and flip it open to the first page to read what I began with. It’s strange how at the time of writing, it feels as though I will never get close enough to the feeling of the thought, but looking back on it, months after, I see the possibility of its voice.
I wrote the piece Marduk, Oblivious, for a magazine submission and then couldn’t bring myself to submit it. It was too stressful to think of a pen name, to go through with submitting it under an alias, to wonder if it was too underdeveloped to put even a pen name to. Would I look back and feel embarrassment if it were published? It was all too much. Far too much stress for a 900-odd word piece of text.
Writing and rewriting interminably, not even referencing previous drafts that go on for pages and pages of dialogue and development. Pantsing based on a few key phrases or ideas, spinning them out of fresh clay every time and never looking back at former incarnations until the notebook is finished. A box of empty pens, hours and hours of ink and paper, and no submissions to show for it. I sit here trying to chastise myself and feel a distinct lack of regret.
Am I afraid of commitment? Do I simply not want to publish anything? The sentence is so hard to get inside from the other side, as I write it.
