Tools of the Trade

I went on a breathtaking walk yesterday, from Kingswear to Froward  Point, delving into green clefts, glimpsing patches of Mediterranean blue - sea?  sky? - we could hardly tell which was which along the brush stroke blur of the horizon. Walking through an overgrown gully the smell of cut nettles and grasses was everywhere.  Ahead of us on the path a man was scything the verges -- and I mean scything - his blade catching drowsy flowers unaware, filling the air with the scent of bruised leaves and severed stems.  He said he always worked by hand, when we stopped for a chat, because he liked the silence and the lack of fumes. As we walked on, behind us we could hear him sharpening his scythe, and the knifing whispers as he set to work again.

It made me long for a clean sheet of paper and a sharpened pencil. I regret the fact that I work on a computer, but it’s pragmatic: it makes revising much easier -- you can draft and then re-draft and re-draft again without what you are trying to say disappearing into a knot of scribblings out. And I think it's quicker; I think it is… But to satisfy the longing for a blank sheet of paper, off white in colour, faintly veined with turquoise lines, I make notes by hand.  Every thought I have goes into a little red book: jottings and plottings, small epiphanies, this and that.  It's the rawest of raw material, the first engagement with an idea, the freshest and the truest.  And I always write in pencil, and I love the way it starts off as sharp as a pin and becomes softened and blunted by my scrawl, so like the man in the hedgerow, I have to sharpen it before I can start again.

Take a Dictation, Ms Dunn

Stephen King once talked about writing as being a kind of transcription, a thought I've often had myself but never really articulated.  At the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, it is rather like listening to a voice inside your head (call the doctor, somebody!) and writing down what it says.  As a writer, you need to be receptive to this voice, as it is easily drowned out by stuff;  you need to tune in and in order to avoid all the hiss and static which gets in the way, it is probably helpful to have a quiet and private space in which to work.

This voice, this murmur, demands your attention, as sometimes it is difficult to hear. It also demands your respect -- you have to nurture it by reading eclectically and thereby giving yourself a wide sphere of reference so that you can tell when it strikes a duff note. You also have to learn to challenge it, so that when it is falling short you have the confidence to make it go back and repeat, and repeat, and then repeat once more.

I've often thought that when I'm writing I'm doing a great deal of thinking and imagining, but perhaps all I'm really doing is listening, straining to catch the elusive whisper that will send my fingers flittering over the keyboard like some crazed stenographer alone in the courtroom; perhaps this isn't creative writing at all, it's creative transcription.

PS Stephen King, On Writing - personal, outspoken, quirky and eminently practical.