A writer’s notebook
August 22, 2005 | 12:00am
Out of curiosity, readers and students sometimes ask me about my writing habits – how I work, when I write, what I write with. Do I still write with a fountain pen – perhaps with a Mahler adagio playing in the background? Do I seal myself off from the claims and alarums of our troubled world? I suppose these questions have to do with the natural desire to reduce writing to a comprehensible physical system, shorn of the mumbo-jumbo it too often gets associated with.
(The Paris Review, which ran a terrific series of interviews with many of the best authors of the 20th century, would often pop the "process" question toward the end of an interview, asking poets like T.S. Eliot or his friend Conrad Aiken how they wrote and what they wrote with. Aiken, for his part, recounted that "I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter the same time I was. And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose – that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style – and that one must be careful about that. Because, you see, you couldn’t look ahead quite far enough, for you were always thinking about putting your fingers on the bloody keys.")
Today, of course, we work with computers, and that’s my short if admittedly unromantic answer. If truth be told, most of my earliest (and some people say better) stories were written in longhand with a Bic ball pen on yellow legal pad paper I filched from the office. Then I moved on to an ancient Royal typewriter, which was a pain to wrestle with – especially if you had to use carbon paper and onionskin to produce four copies of your magnum opus for the Palancas. I professed the obligatory resistance when computers first became an option in the mid-1980s, going so far as to pack an Olympia portable into my luggage when I set off for graduate school in America – but there and then I met my first Mac, and was hooked for life.
When we moved into our present house, and after several years of searching for the perfect setup, I had two tables made in my study to support the infrastructure I now can’t live and work without. That includes a desktop eMac that’s constantly on-line (great for Google, which supplies me instantly with tidbits such as that Aiken quote above), the PowerBook laptop I write these columns and nearly everything else on, and the 14-inch TV that’s also always on, tuned to either CNN, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, ANC, or CSI on AXN. The house and the office are fully wired (or rather, unwired, with Wi-Fi.) I can’t write without some background buzz; silence or soft music makes me sleepy, and I’m a 24-hour news junkie, so it might as well be CNN or ANC that keeps me awake. My desktop’s a mess, with the cell phone charger constantly jostling for space with the stapler and the external hard drive and the oversized juice tumbler. (On the other side of the room, within arm’s reach, is my little stash of Hershey bars, chippies, crackers, and beef jerky; a little wheeled caddy takes care of the boiled corn and the sotanghon soup. Once upon a famished youth, I vowed that I would never go hungry again, and have yet to break that promise, with 210 pounds to show for my resolution.)
Unless I’m on the road, I write every single waking day – not my own fiction, sorry to say, but the kind of hard labor that will pay for the family noodles and all these digital doohickeys. I’m usually at my desk from about 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., and also just after lunch, before my afternoon class, with a half-hour nap for dessert. I write most comfortably in pajamas. (This reminds me of another story, recounted by Donald Hall, about a young American poet who begged for a snippet of T.S. Eliot’s wisdom on the eve of the poet’s departure for Oxford, a great adventure that Eliot himself had embarked on four decades earlier. "As gravely as if he were recommending salvation," Hall writes, "Mr. Eliot advised the purchase of long woolen underwear because of Oxford’s damp stone.")
Sometimes I feel tethered to my corner like a dog to a fencepost, and one of these days I know I’ll just keel over from a carbohydrate overdose, but it sure beats planting rice or hauling baggage, so I can’t complain. Hopefully, before I croak, I’ll have written something worth the expense of all those potato chips and Ding-Dong mixed nuts.
I don’t maintain a journal, a diary, or even a blog – isn’t this column more than enough? – but I do keep a very special notebook, a "moleskine" (that’s right, with an "e"). For all my digital gear, I never go without a moleskine, especially on my travels – the back pocket is great for little bits of ephemera like train tickets, restaurant receipts, calling cards, etc. I always keep a couple of pristine spares at home (the small, ruled version, about $10-12 each in the typical stationery stores you’ll find in airports and railway terminals abroad; they come in many sizes and varieties).
I don’t know if he used a moleskine, but W. Somerset Maugham – one of my early literary heroes – kept a notebook from his 18th year in 1892 until 1949, when A Writer’s Notebook was finally published, containing such trenchant observations as "Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom."
My current moleskine is filled with distinctly more pedestrian jottings such as: "New Yorkers can predict, a minute before it happens, when the lights will change, and waste no time rushing forward across the street"; "red poppies flecking the green meadows"; "a thirtyish Korean, black business suit, purple shirt, black printed tie, and two wristwatches!"; "They serve us vin santo with homemade cookies like camachile bread – cantucci – dipped into the wine"; "gauzelike fences; the light collects in the great hollow"; and "Lu-li Island – lulubog, lilitaw."
For those of you who’ve never seen or used a moleskine, those fine people at Wikipedia have this to say:
"A moleskine is a style of notebook currently being manufactured by Modo & Modo of Italy. A moleskine is bound in oilcloth-covered cardboard (moleskin), has an elastic band to hold the notebook closed, and, due to the sewn spine, lays flat when opened.
"Moleskine’s most famous endorsement comes from Bruce Chatwin, who used them constantly throughout his travels, and wrote about them glowingly. Chatwin’s original source of notebooks dried up in 1986, when the owner of the Paris stationer where he purchased them died. The modern moleskine is fashioned after Chatwin’s descriptions of the notebooks he used and are not a direct descendant.
"Although Modo & Modo claims the notebook has been used by other well-known artists and writers, such as Picasso, Matisse, and Hemingway, it is not clear that they used the same style of notebook that Chatwin did, though there is evidence that they used some kind of ‘pocket notebook.’ One well-known writer who has confirmed using them is Neil Gaiman, who wrote about his love of moleskine notebooks on his blog.
"Today the moleskine notebook has a romantic image as a traveler’s notebook of choice, mostly due to Chatwin’s heavy endorsement during his own many travels and Modo & Modo’s advertising of that fact. Moleskines have a cult-like (but playful) following today. Although more expensive than the average notebook, its adherents swear by the high quality and design."
I did say that I’d keep the mumbo-jumbo out of this, but there’s something close to mystical about the contact of pen with paper, the commitment of a random thought to a medium more permanent than memory. Of course, no one really needs a $10 notebook and a $150 pen to write something of value, and you can chalk down the kaartehan (at least in my case) to either an inflated measure of self-worth or, just as likely, an urge to reward oneself for unspeakably unexciting and even humiliating labors. But then I’m 51, an age when tactile pleasure can exist and be appreciated for its own sake – and better now, before it’s too late.
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