For me, there’s something really cathartic about putting pen to paper, noticing how one’s handwriting changes mid-paragraph, watching the ink flow neatly from the rollerball. I am very specific about pens, less so about paper. My bags and purses are filled with schnipsels of paper, scenes imagined on the backs of receipts, quotes shoved into spines as bookmarks. I write with some regularity, in that I put pen to paper, and that act alone, regardless of the output, soothes me.
But if we’re talking about writing, about coming up with characters and a scene, many scenes, or crafting and drafting and revising something with a little heft, changing this word for that and do-si-doing syntax for a better rhythm, well, I haven’t done much of that in a long time. And that kind of writing, for me, is more conflicted and best done at a computer, white expanse shining back at you while the cursor blinks.
In college, I majored in literature and creative writing. I wrote fiction, almost exclusively, forty or fifty pages per semester. Every time a story was due, I would walk around preoccupied for weeks, trying to come up with scenes as dynamic as the characters I had started to concoct. I loved writing characters, envisioning their morning routines, whether they would leave time on the microwave screen, whether they could carry a tune or not. The quirks. That part of the process appealed to my extreme attention to detail, allowed me to harness that trait that is otherwise a little exhausting. The problem was always making the characters do things. I wanted to place them on the stage, clap my hands and say, “OK, it’s up to you now!” Plot was not my strong suit. I wrote a lot of bathtub stories.
So to meet those classroom deadlines and turn in an actual story – beginning, middle, end – I would hole up in my apartment for the weekend. I would grocery shop in advance. I would buy beer. If at all possible, I would also clean beforehand, because even the most dreaded task becomes tempting when you’re sitting and staring and trying to make characters come alive and failing. And then I would play around and see what happened.
It was hard work, in some ways, but also really gratifying when I could make it go right. I assume this is how a mathematician must feel when a complicated problem is completed correctly, when the checks and balances lead you to believe you’re temporarily in control. Your effort justified.
I would rarely talk to anyone else over the weekend, especially about what I was writing, not wanting their input, not wanting to break the spell. I never knew how the story would end, figuring a solution would emerge at some point. The right moment to dim the lights. And honestly, sometimes that moment never came and I just ended it, sappily, when I had reached my page limit and couldn’t think of anything better. Before bed late, late on Sunday night (or more accurately Monday morning, if you look at it like that, which I never have), I would email my draft off to a couple of people. A friend or two, maybe my mom, maybe a creative writer who wasn’t in class with me. I would do one final draft read-through in the morning if I had time but wouldn’t check my email. And then I would make copies and distribute them to my classmates, feeling slightly nauseous while awaiting their critique two days later. It wasn’t finished, but it was done. For then. Ideas and people and places were on paper, things I had dreamed up, a few little risks I had taken. And as much as I had to force myself to do it, to be sequestered and anti-social for a while, I came back into the world feeling a sense of relief, of accomplishment, a turn of phrase ringing in my ears, a smirk on my face.
I miss that feeling.
I’m not sure how, but it’s a feeling I’d like to get back. It’s not so much “now or never” as “now or not now,” and in a way, that’s scarier. The obvious follow-up is “If not now, when?” A question without a clear answer. A mathematical problem without an obvious solution. A blinking cursor broadcasting the same message every second: write. write. write.
I like writing, photography, reading, music, design, typography, paper products, days in the seventies and sparkly snow, Spanish wine and cans of PBR. I spent a year in Córdoba, Spain, working as a 
