J. Austen time

I’m writing this the way Jane Austen wrote.

Well, sort of.

I am, at least, writing by hand, my pen making faint scratching noises as it skitters across the blank surface of the page, leaving words in its wake.  I have retreated to my library, opened up the handkerchief table, and am sitting in front of the two tall windows that form the only bookless wall in the room.  When I pause to think, I can look out and see leaves drifting down from hundreds of trees outside.

This is amazing, I tell myself.  What a wonderful way to feel connected to all those generations of writers who lived and wrote before the advent of the computer or even the typewriter.  What a refreshing break from my usual stressful, plugged-in work habits.  What a relaxing, idyllic, zen way of creating.

What a load of malarkey.

I’m writing this by hand because my power went out right in the middle of working on another blog entry—an entry that is now trapped in my powerless computer.  I’ve retreated to the library—which on a floorplan of my house would be labeled as the middle-sized of the three bedrooms—because my desk does not have enough room to hold a pad of paper.  My desk holds the keyboard, the monitor, and those few odds and ends that I may need while writing.  Well, and also a much larger collection of odds and ends that somehow make their way onto my desk, to remain until I get stuck on a passage and suddenly decide that my cluttered desk is clearly the real reason for my inability to write myself out of whatever corner I’m written myself into. 

Here in the library, I have a small empty table.  I also have a good distance between me and the beeping noise my Universal Power Supply is making as it runs out of juice. And then there’s the fact that from the library I can see if any of the Dominion Power trucks return.   They arrived in force a while ago—the clocks are electric, so I have no idea precisely how long a while—and then decamped without succeeding in restoring power.  Grr.

The sad truth is that I am a electronic creature.  A writer totally dependent on the computer.  Oh, sure, if some scenario out of science fiction came to pass and all the computers in the world vanished in an instant—a sort of cyber Rapure, with all carbon-based life forms left behind—I would find a way to adapt and carry on with my writing.  But short of something like that, I write on a computer.  On a keyboard, my fingers dance and skip; the words appear at a steady pace in comfortingly legible letters—not at all like my chicken scratch handwriting.  And revisions and editing are a snap—how much easier to make needed changes when you can add, delete, and move words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages with a few keystrokes. 

Back in college, before I’d even met my first word processing program, I was already writing in what many fellow writers thought was an odd manner.  I wrote on an old electric typewriter, on the back of used 8-1/2 by 11 paper (an early form of recycling, though economy, not ecology, was my main motivation).  If I started a sentence and didn’t like it, I’d simply do a carriage return and start the line over.  As many times as it took.  My rough drafts would look something like this:

    Eight-seven years ago
    A little less than a century ago
    Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
    continent a new country
    continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated
    to the idea
    to the notion
    to the idea that all men are created equal.
    to the perposition
    to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Then I’d cut and paste the good bits together on the back of more used 8-1/2 by 11 paper, and type my fair copy from that that rough draft—very rough, with little snippets of paper waving gaily in the air whenever I picked up a page.  A strange method, maybe, but it worked for me, and it meant that the first instant I got my hands on a word processor, I bonded with it, and have been writing on a computer ever since.  I can be amazingly productive on a computer.

And right now I need to be productive—I have a great deal of writing to do right now, more than I can possibly do by hand.  If this goes on, I will have to find someone who has power at their house and go over there to type up this entry and post it.  And then maybe I can do a little work on my book until—

Bliss.  I just heard the whoosh of my furnace going on. 

Clearly I would not have been a highly productive writer in Jane Austen’s time.  She could conceal her writing when someone entered the drawing room, and then pick it up again when the visitors left. Me, I’d spend the entire time between visitors trying to decipher my own handwriting. 

Still, I know there are excellent writers who do their first drafts in longhand.  Maybe I should give this writing by hand thing another try sometime.

Just as long as it’s my choice, not Dominion Electric’s.