Earning Turns Revisited

It's snowing in Syracuse today. This is not news. Actually, it's pretty standard for January. I always get a little melancholic when it snows because I can't ski anymore. But I've talked about this before when I wrote "Earning Turns" a few years back. "Earn you turns" is a skiing term that means a skier has skied the "back country" by hiking up a mountain then skiing down it. I didn't know this when I wrote my first post so many years ago but I don't regret it. My kids were earning their turns in their own way and while skiing didn't grab them the way it grabbed me, I was glad that I exposed them to it. The expression "earn your turns" got me thinking though. When you think about it a little, it's a great metaphor for writing.  

When you start writing, you're in the wilderness, hiking up the mountain in hopes of finding the perfect run that no one has ever taken before. Or at the very least one that only a few people have so you can make your own mark. There's an anticipation and nervousness that comes with the unknown as a new project looms and you stumble your way through the bleakness, seeking and searching. Then you find it. That perfect run. The one that had been eluding you. A blank sheet of snow stretching out, ready for you to carve up how you see fit. It's familiar but intimidating. The first step is the hardest but once you take it, everything comes back to you in a rush. The silence of a winter's morn is replaced by the creak of a boot and the whisper of the skis on the snow. The tautness gives way to muscle memory as you guide the seventy plus inches of fiberglass through the snow. Stone and tree blur by and you feel a sense of accomplishment as you complete the run. You can't help but look back at what you've done and feel some pride that you did it. The entire process is never quite easy and if you're doing it right it should be a little difficult. It's like the quote from A League of Their Own, "It's supposed to be hard, if it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." 

I think it's a damn fine metaphor, if you ask me. So, let's go earn some turns and get some writing done. 

Properly Attired

While I was down the rabbit hole of looking at writers and their typewriters, something caught my eye in the photos. Not the typewriters or any other technology they use, but rather the way they were dressed. No, seriously. It sounds like a silly thing to notice but it made me think of the adage "dress for the job you want not the job you have." 

Almost everyone in the photos is well put together. Men at the very least in slacks and button down shirts, often with ties and sports coats. Sometimes in a smart looking sweater or cardigan. (I truly believe after my yearly viewing of the beginning of the year Twilight Zone marathon that cardigans and sweater vests need to make a comeback.) Women almost all wore skirts and blouses with pearls, usually in flats with the occasional pair of heels. The most frequent accessory besides their typewriters? Cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes. But there was more. 

Mixed in was your occasional pair of jeans (David Letterman), flip-flops (Ian Fleming of all people), and some hats (Terry Pratchett, Damon Runyon, Will Self). Mickey Spillane liked to show off his guns. Hunter S. Thompson wore shorts and often eschewed shirts. Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote in their pajamas. George RR Martin has his Greek fisherman's hat and suspenders while David Foster Wallace liked bandanas and Joan Didion had her sunglasses. 

Actually, we have a lot in common when it comes to writing attire.

It got me thinking about the way that I dress, especially when I write. I dress like a schlub. I have a schlubs's physique. I'm tall, hunchbacked with a big belly. I have relatively broad shoulders but recent years of neglect have ebbed away any muscle that I once had hiding under the soft exterior. Most of my wardrobe consists of jeans, sweatpants, athletic shorts and formless tops like sweatshirts, henleys and t-shirts. I'm not exactly ready for my candid typewriter shot. Usually, when I'm writing, it's later at night and I'm in a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt. What job am I dressing for? 

It amazes me the things that I notice about writing when I'm not writing. Why would I focus on what writers wear when they write? Why would I think that was important? Maybe it's my quest for that writing ideal. The perfect tool. The perfect place. The perfect writing attire. The prefect writing scenario. Something that probably doesn't exist. 

My Own Space

Recently, instead of writing or grading, like I should be doing, I found myself researching sheds. It became something of an obsession and occupied my time. Now I'm not talking about the kind of sheds most of us have in our back yards, filled to the brim with lawn supplies, tools and old Christmas decorations. No, I'm talking about a comfy place sequestered from the rest of the house just for myself. A place to get away and write. It's really a romantic but completely unfeasible notion. But a boy can dream can't he?

I like that it has a porch.

This all started when I read online that Wes Anderson had replicated to the tiniest detail the writing hut of Roald Dahl for his Netflix short films. I started to wonder about writing places and, as is my wont, fell down a pretty big rabbit hole. There's a lot out there about writer's sheds. Names like George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas (who inspired Dahl in the first place), Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and, of course, Henry David Thoreau (even though his mother did his laundry and brought him sandwiches) all had sheds, shacks or huts where they wrote. Neil Gaiman has his gazebo. Chuck Wendig has his "mystery box." Yann Martel has his back yard writing studio. Eoin Colfer and David McCullough sought refuge from busy families in their own writing sheds. Michael Pollan wrote an entire book about the entire enterprise of building a shed for his writing on his property. And it's made me want one of my own. I just feel like I need a writing space all to myself. 

I'm fascinated by the idea of writer's spaces in general. There's an entire Instagram account and hashtag about writer's spaces and I can't stop looking at it. I want a cool space to work in. I don't really have one now or maybe it's that I just don't use the space I have properly. I do most of my writing from the comfort of my couch and I wonder if that's part of the problem (though it worked for Truman Capote and Stephen Sondheim). Maybe I'm not a couch writer. Maybe I need to be at a desk or a table. I've found great success writing at my kitchen counter, though that gets uncomfortable after a while. I do well in cafes and I wrote most of this sitting at a rickety table in a cold room at the back of the school. 

I do have a great little desk/alcove in my study that's perfect for writing.  I haven't used as much as I should, for no good reason. Maybe it's time to change that. I mean there's no way my wife is going to let me plop a fourth shed in our backyard (and who could blame her?), so I'll have to make due with what I have. Plus, who wants to trudge across the backyard on a cold, snowy kind of day like today? I need to make that space my own. 

I started this process before the holidays. I bought a really nice chair  that I'm not putting together until I finish a few other around the house projects. I can't use the folding chair that's in there now because of my back. I still have to finish tidying it up and organizing a few things. I'll be sharing the space with my daughter so I won't be alone in the room but at least I won't be on the couch. It's not perfect and I'm sure there will be some bump along the way, but I think in the long run it'll work. It'll focus me on what I need to do, be that writing or grading. Speaking of which, I have some grading to do. I suppose that the kitchen counter will have to do, for now.

Corona, Futura and Stephen King's Wang

My friend Brian uses a typewriter (1938 Corona Sterling) and recently sent me a bit of correspondence using said typewriter. To be honest, it was kind of cool. It's been a long time since I'd read/seen something typewritten. I thought about how I should respond. I thought about using my own typewriter (a Royal Futura 800, gifted to me by my friend Justin) but after a long side eye from the wife, I decided to just send him an email in return. But it did get me thinking about typewriters and the tools we use to write. 

When you think about it, until relatively recently most "writing" was done on typewriters. There are still some writers that still use typewriters not unlike my Futura or Brian's Corona. And we're talking about people that don't write small books. David McCullough, Robert Caro, Cormac McCarthy and even Danielle Steel. I think about my last post. How much of Wheel of Time was written on a typewriter? I mean great googly moogly, that's a lot of paper. That's a lot of ribbon. That's a lot of time. 

There's almost a romance to it. The sounds alone: the platen makes when you roll the paper in, the click-clack tapping of the keys, the typebar hitting the paper, the ding at the end of the line and the thunk of the carriage return lever. But there's also a sense of labor in typing. A sense of satisfaction by the end of the page that you've done the work. 

A few nights ago I fell down a rabbit hole, looking at pictures of famous writers/artists/celebrities and their typewriters. It was fascinating and interesting to see. This was the way people used to work. Computers for the purpose of word processing is a pretty new thing. One, I think, that we take for granted. It's made writing a novel something anyone can do anywhere they could do it. It's said that Stephen King was an early adopter of this digital revolution, using a Wang Word Processor by the early 80s. (A $12,000 piece of equipment at the time.) I read somewhere that King may have been the first author to have a novel published that was written entirely on a computer. (A simple Google search seems to refute this, but it's still a cool piece of mythology.)

Stephen King and his Wang

Besides paper and ink, I've only ever used computers, mostly using Microsoft Word. (I'm sure in my younger days we owned a typewriter and I tried to write using that, because that's what writers did in the late 80s/early 90s.) I've used other word processors. Google Docs is incredibly useful and a back up when I need it. I tried Scrivener but found it overwhelming. Even George RR Martin, one of my literary idols, uses Word Star 4.0, a 30 year old word processing program that runs on DOS and from what I've seen it looks almost as unwieldy as Scrivener. I've never had a huge issue with Word and I've grown accustomed to it. I have other friends that swear by other things. Some even use typewriters.