So, I ran out of notebook the other day and had to take a day’s hiatus from the writing of Myranda’s Story. I was so desperate for space that I even wrote on the little bit of paper left from a torn out page.
Well now I’ve picked up some notebooks. A nice A5 sized lined paper one this time round. That should keep me on track for some time. It’s got 150 pages so that’s 300 pages written. See if you’re not a writer you might not appreciate how splendid it is to find a notebook.
Here’s the deal, I hate spiral notebooks. I’m left handed and my hand tends to rest on the spiral which is irritating. Plus the spiral makes the whole thing bulkier and you can’t generally cram it in a coat or jeans pocket. So I prefer either pocket-sized notebooks or bound flexible ones. This time I’ve got a bound flexible one. It’s usable. I’ve got 2.5 pages in it already and it makes me want to keep going.
Sometimes when you write the pen glides across the surface of the paper almost effortlessly and sometimes depending on the pen and the paper you feel the grit of the paper or some irregularities in the pen. It gives a visceral feeling of doing something that way. When the pen glides without problem it doesn’t feel like something is being accomplished, sometimes.
I have some fountain pens, cheap, plastic jobs that I like to write with from time to time. They take a little work and maintenance, but the feeling of that stiff point of the pen could be likened to the feeling you get when someone scratches your back.
I once read somewhere that you should vary the instruments that you write with in order to see how your work varies. So I do. The first book was all typed on the laptop. The second was written in a series of thin block (graph paper) notebooks. Most of it was done with the aforementioned fountain pens, some was done with cheap disposable ball-points.
This story is a lined paper book it looks like. The pen is actually a language school pen from where I used to work. Luckily, I’ve got a stack of them and a source for more in case I run out. Hana (the source) saw that I was using the pen from the school and couldn’t believe it, knowing how much I dislike that school. But it doesn’t matter where the tools come from, it’s how the master implements them that decides their value.
Ohh, I like that. I think that will be a quote for Guggenheim in the book now.
“…it doesn’t matter where the tools come from, it’s how the master implements them that decides their value…” -Guggenheim