Life, Writing, Weirdness

I often say that my writing habits are eclectic. What I usually mean by that is that I write in more genres than a lot of people would probably consider normal. Or maybe not. Things seem less limited when I look particularly at indie authors in recent years. Yes, a lot of folks do seem to have preferences, but a lot also seem to want to explore.

Personally, while I write mostly in Science Fiction and Fantasy (probably about a 60/40 split between the two), I also branch out into what a lot of people would call Horror (although in my brain most of it fits comfortably into Fantasy), and historical fiction (the 80s are historical, right?), and I may have committed some Literary fiction and a Western or two.

So eclectic is fair, but I could also apply that word to the way I write. Yes, I’ve set things up so that I can access whatever I’m working on from whatever computer I happen to be using, but I also:

• Sometimes dictate while I’m driving to or from campus and then let speech to text software sort it out later.
• Send myself texts or email from my phone with short notes or ideas that can later be transferred to the appropriate working document.
• Have a small notebook or pack of post-its in my pocket or backpack along with a pencil so I can scribble something.
• Have several scattered notebooks with various things in progress.

There have actually been a lot of notebooks over the years and I’m not always timely at getting those things into a computer backup that’s harder to misplace (because I’ve learned to keep backups in several locations that will be unaffected by me moving to a new computer platform or email service if I happened to).

But, as the title of this post suggests, I do consider there are benefits to working on paper. In my case, usually with a pencil because that means I can erase and fix a word on the go. That’s the first benefit, and it’s a big one.

Second: I can’t write nearly as fast as I can type, especially if I want it to be completely legible. Typing is often great for getting the story, or whatever part of it I’m working on, out of my head as quickly as possible. Writing things out by hand, though, forces me to slow down and think about word choices and where things are going. A story where the first draft happens long hand needs a lot less time on the second (fix what’s broken) and third (make it pretty) drafts. I’ve no idea if it balances or not.

Third: there’s a bit of pleasant nostalgia involved, reminding me of when that was the only way for me to get a story down, before most of us had joined the home computer era.

Fourth, I can’t write poetry with a keyboard. Well, I probably can, but it feels wrong. There’s a lot of agonizing over word choice in a poem. Everything is condensed and focused, or should be, especially if it’s my best work. Speed of getting things down isn’t needed. Transferring to an electronic document then becomes the second draft (actually, this sometimes happens with prose, too) and I can make adjustments and changes as I go.

And finally, I still like it. It’s part of what makes the writing experience complete for me. I’m not particularly concerned with the ideas of commercial or critical success. I need to write to continue being me and so I need the experience to be good for me overall. Scribbling into a notebook or onto scrap piece of paper or post-it note help that, so I’ll keep doing it.

So I guess eclectic fits in a couple of ways.

Be well, everyone.