Is there an irony, or at least a disconnect, about the fact I’m writing this post on a computer to add to a website that can only be viewed on an electronic device? Probably.
The computer I’m writing on is not in the best of health today — it’s just come back from a service to investigate a defective trackpad, and is now functioning even worse than it was before. So ahead of the computer going back in for another bit of exploratory surgery later this week, I’ll sneak one last blog post out on it.
My theatre writing, almost without exception, is computer work. Once I’m at the stage of getting stuck into the draft of a theatre script — or the text for a piece of theatre, if “script” sometimes feels like the wrong word — I do it on a laptop. I don’t think there’s an easier way for me to tackle theatre writing than that — the whole process involves constant jumping around to add or cut or tweak or move bits of text around as ideas come to me from moment to moment about something someone should say.
The same goes for stage directions, but I’ve got much, much better at keeping those to a bare minimum now. (I used to be TERRIBLE for writing long, poetic, pointless, often largely unplayable stage directions, but I learned my lesson the hard way, sitting in rehearsal rooms, struggling to explain what I was getting at to actors who had no clue what I meant, or why I hadn’t just said what I meant without all the garnish.)
If theatre writing feels like a continual meander of backwards-and-forwards micro-editing, prose writing by contrast feels like a steady forward flow, sometimes slow but often capable of moving quite swiftly. The reason I think I’ve encountered this difference of pace is all to do with the fact that, since I started writing novels, I’ve written the first drafts by hand.
R.C., my first novel, was written in 80 2-hour sessions across 40 non-consecutive days between mid-January and late March 2023. (I was piloting the J G Ballard “two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon” method which I discussed in an earlier post, On establishing a writing routine.) Equipped with a stack of A4 school exercise books and some (uncomfortable) hexagonal pens, and with a 25,000 word synopsis as a roadmap, I managed to write just shy of 150,000 words — so not quite 1,000 words an hour.
I found I was able to do something with my novel which would be unthinkable with most of my theatre writing. I just wrote. Wrote whatever it occurred to me to write. Wrote with a sense of purpose and momentum, but also with the ability to lean into my language at a leisurely pace. Wrote without making much more than an occasional backwards trip to add a few words, or an asterisk where a more developed thought would eventually need to go — but never stopping to rework a section, only going forward, trusting that at some point, when and only when I had finished a full draft, I would have plenty of time to come back and revisit everything and fix what wasn’t working.
Despite the discomfort from my rapidly deepening pen dent (alleviated with some fabric plaster applied to my thumb and middle finger at the start of each working day), there was something utterly joyous and dignifying about this longhand, click-free, unelectrified method of writing. Someone — I cannot remember who now, or find the relevant quote, but in the back of my mind, it was Fay Weldon — talked somewhere about the slowing down of thought that handwriting enables (or imposes), because you can only commit thoughts to paper at the speed your hand can write them, and that is significantly slower than the speed someone can type (even a clumsy two-finger typer like me.)
I said I found this dignifying just now, and I really stand by that. The whole process of writing R.C. helped me to recover my dignity after what I can now see were several bruising years of professional burnout. One of the keys to that was the effect of writing by hand on having the time to live with my own words, to build more of a relationship with them because of how long it would take me to get them out of my head and onto a page. By the time I was typing up the first draft in Summer 2023, I already had an attachment to my sentences and paragraphs and chapters, a respect for them, a desire to do right by them in the editing process, that is quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with theatre writing.
My second novel, O.C., will be written over one calendar month in October 2024, again by hand, but this time with an added pressure because the writing forms part of a public-facing project (True Voyage Is Return) and isn’t just a private act of daily writing discipline. People will know what I’m doing, and will want to know how it’s going. They’ll definitely want to know how many words I’ve written, falling into that old trap of equating productivity with quality.
I think I’ll be ready to start on 7th October. I have no choice, really. And I’m hoping that those old familiar feelings of joy and dignity will be back to keep me company again — along with a renewed deepening of my trusty old pen dent.
