Writing Essentials

Writing is not about the words or the art or the stories, really. That’s reading. When you sit and read what someone has written, you are carried away by the beauty of the words, the engine of a great plot (or even a bad one), and the other world you occupy for just a while.

But writing itself? The essentials really boil down to this: the chair, the keyboard, the retreat.

Everything else is distraction.

Let’s define our terms. The chair: that place from which you apply pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. It might be standing up, as we hear reports of Hemingway having done. (That might explain his simpler sentence structure.) It might be a mahogany desk and carved matching chair, a camp stool in Africa, or a spare dining room chair pulled up to a card table.

For me, it’s a really uncomfortable broken-down office chair that wants replacing. It squeaks. I have a Herman Miller Aeron chair in my Amazon shopping cart, but what is the guarantee that even a $600 chair won’t end up killing my back after three hours of sitting? A chiropractor told me that, after 45 minutes, ANY chair is going to be bad for you.

But the chair is that object that you keep your butt in so that you can continue to put words on a page. That's the only way I know for writing to get written.

The keyboard: The writing instrument, really. These days, it’s a keyboard. My fingers fly faster this way, and tap out words almost as fast as I can think them. I have a typewriter that got me started about 40 years ago, and every now and then, I tap on it. If I had to do that now, I think it would cause sudden and permanent carpal tunnel. I also have writing instruments called pens. My favorites are Uniball pens in purple and blue. It says “waterproof” but they are not.

Of course, you must connect the keyboard to a computer, or the typewriter and pen to paper, but these days, paper just doesn’t matter. I’m not sure I could make the cognitive switch to a Kindle or Sony reader, but that day is coming, sooner or later. I still write and imagine the feel of my book in my hands. But paper or screen, it matters not to me.

Finally, the retreat. By this, I mean the quiet house, the silenced cell phone, the kids occupied at something or out of the house so that the whispers from the Muse can get through. But also, the distractions must be minimized to keep one from checking email or seeing if Amazon has dropped the price on a box of pens or a new keyboard (because I need both). However, it cannot be too quiet. Birds outside the window, the pacing border collie wishing for a walk, the steady hum of the spin cycle. These are happy noises that keep the words coming....

Now that this writing is done, it’s time to tend to folding the laundry, putting away the dishes and walking the dog. But perhaps there will be more writing later today... unless I succumb to the thousand distractions conspiring to keep me from chair, keyboard and retreat.