When you have to write

I read an article recently, written by an insufferable writer. I've never actually read any of the fiction she's written, but I can tell, just by reading this little essay, that what she writes has to be insufferable. I won't name her; I don't want to be sued, or harassed by any of her fans that happen across my obscure blog. I'm sure there are some who think she's just the top of the trees, the best writer since Dickens or Voltaire or Homer.

Why did I find it insufferable? It's because she takes herself far more seriously than she takes her writinng. And how can I tell this?

She'll only write with a black fountain pen of a certain luxury brand, and will only write with a certain brand of black ink, and said that once she had to make do with blue-black ink, and felt as though she was slumming. She will only write certain things in certain notebooks that she bought in this little hidden shop in Venice, or from a book stall in Madrid, or Milan or St. Tropez or Dublin or Zurich. She will write notes for her novel in one book; sentences in another, single words in another. She has a handmade book of handmade paper with a hand-dyed suede cover that she found in a gallery, and reserves that for single sentences that she constructs, sentences of such surpassing beauty that they must never set metrical foot in anything as plebian as a mass-produced book she found in a little shop in Majorca, which, though lovely and expensive and rare and oh so European, is just too low-class for her sentences of surpassing beauty. She only puts one sentence of supassing beauty on each hand-made page, so that it will not have to rub elbows with any other sentence, even others of surpassing beauty.

In one notebook she writes in English; in another, of similar design but a different color cover, she writes the same sentence in French. In another she writes her daily thoughts on Proust. But never, never would she soil her fingers with a Bic or a Papermate or even a really decent pen like a refillable rollerball available at the corner bookstore. And never would she soil her deathless prose by forcing its ink to mingle withsuch common and vulgar material as Mead college-lined filler paper. Heaven forfend!

I think this lady is not a real writer. See, when you're a real writer, when the urge to write hits, you HAVE to WRITE, and it doesn't matter with what, or on what. You have to get it out, get it down before that brilliant flash of words is gone. They may turn out later to not be so brilliant, but at that moment when the Muse is shouting at you, hitting you over the head with a bag of words, it is the most brilliant combination of letters since the invention of the alphabet.

I have a pen I prefer, a kind of beat-up Sheaffer Javelin fine point fountain pen, loaded with blue-black ink. It's a dark steel-blue, but the paint is rubbed and scratched off in places, so the brass shows through. There is no paper I especially prefer, though I go through spells - narrow-ruled glue-top pads, blank copy paper, spiral notebooks, the aforementioned Mead loose-leaf filler paper, maybe even legal pads, in a pinch. But when the muse hits, if my comfortable, companionable pen and paper are not within reach, I will write anyway. Somehow, I will get the words down.

I will write with a Bic Stic ballpoint, medium point, red ink, on the back of a paper placemat in a diner. I will write with the tiny pad-and-pen set I keep in my purse for emergency grocery lists, directions, recipes and other assorted notes. I will write with a  #4 pencil on the unused address-book pages of my dayplanner.

A couple of years ago I was out to dinner in the Birdseye Diner in Castleton, in the midst of a perfect maelstrom of noise, because it was Graduation Weekend at the local college, and everyone and his brother (and sister, and uncles and aunts and neighbors and cousins) were in that diner. The voices alone were deafening, and then there was the overhead music, the crash and clatter of dishes, the noise of traffic on the street... but my Muse out-shouted the noise, and I HAD to WRITE. No notebook - no room for one on the table anyway. No paper placemat... but I had my checkbook. I tore out two or three deposit slips, and dug my emergency backup pen out of my purse (a gel pen that skipped a lot) , and in the midst of deafening noise and distraction, I wrote. And it was good stuff, and made it into the manuscipt.

I once went on a writing jag, and filled a little 6x9 spiral notebook, writing on the right-hand pages. But when I got to the end of the notebook, I still had a lot to write. I was in the woods, having lunch in the lacy shade of early-spring trees, and did not feel like abandoning my lunch and my muse, driving into town, and buying more paper, so I simply started in on the blank backs of the used pages, wrting "backwards", sort of. I wrote on the back of the last page, flipped that page back, continue on the back of the next-to-last page, flipped that one back, and so on.

When I've finished notebooks, I've written on the paper subject dividers. I've written on the cardboard at the back of a glue-top pad. I've written on untidy sheaves of cut-up and torn-up scrap paper. 

When I had read the article by that insufferable writer, I wrote a letter to Mary and told her about it, and received, by return of mail, a letter she had written in part on the inside of the envelope in which I'd sent the letter to her. She'd sat in her car outside the post office, torn the envelope open to lie sort of flat, and had written to me on it with a dull pencil stub she'd found in the glove compartment. And no, that wasn't an intentional comeback to the insufferable writer; the Muse had hit her, then and there, and she HAD to WRITE.

That's the way it is. Yes, it's nice to have the luxury to have a good pen and good paper, but if you HAVE to WRITE, you will use a pencil stub on a torn-up envelope. You'll write on the back of a grocery recipt, or the back - or front - of a grocery list. You'll write on a piece of cardboard with a crayon. You'll write on a piece of scrap lumber with a Sharpie marker. You'll write on a piece of tree bark with a burned match if you have to. But if you hold back... if you refuse to write unless you have that special pen, or that special paper... if what you write with is more important to you that what you write down... then you aren't a writer. You are a dilettante. It's like an artist saying that the brush and canvas are more important than the image that is created on them, a sculptor saying that the stone and chisel are more important than the statue the chisel and the hand and the heart and the eye combine to create. 

Just write.