Tools & Toys

There's a distraction-free writing machine I keep looking at. It's not yet available. If it were, I would likely have bought the damn thing already. I like toys and tools and often don't know the difference. That or I choose not to pay attention to the differences. I know this much: a tool is something I need to get my work done well while a toy is something I usually want mostly when I'm unhappy with my life. A good toy entertains. A good tool transforms. The machine I'm looking at is advertised as a writing tool but I'm not so sure. I've fooled myself about these things before.

I'm typing this on a Chromebook my wife bought for me five and a half years ago. I still loved the old machine I was using but it was dying. If I could have somehow kept it going, I'd be thrilled with it now. It was a tool that felt good under my fingertips in a way few tools ever have, but it died and my wife got me this machine which is fundamentally better in every way: fantastic keyboard, dream screen, and even at over five years old quick as lightning. It is a great tool worth hanging onto.

This notion of good tools has stuck in my head for a few years. I've written about fountain pens, manual typewriters, paper dictionaries, iron skillets, and more, but I can't seem to get the whole idea onto the page or screen. I've chalked that up to inability and laziness, but Annie Dillard provides another explanation:

But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing...you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work. (The Writing Life, 56-57)

Still, this is no excuse not to put something on the page about these things. Nor is it a good excuse to wonder if anyone will care to read it. I worry that no one will like me but the writing doesn't give a damn about that. And the idea simply won't leave me alone.

There is something about these good tools and about the process of separating good tools from ordinary ones. There is value in determining the difference between a tool and a toy and moving from the abstract feeling of these things to the logic and coherence of one word after another pointed at understanding something that feels like it matters.

I'm still considering that writing machine, but probably won't buy it. I'll wait at least until I can decide what it is and maybe come to know a little better who I am here in the kitchen typing on this good tool and there on the page and screen where it's up to you what to think about all that I'm doing.

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I notice that I've linked to articles about the tools I've discussed here and have held back from linking to more. I read these things and they stick with me. I want to think through the tools not as a distraction from the writing (at least I hope not) but as a way to take down some more of the barriers between thinking something and putting it down on the page.

There's no hope of eliminating all those barriers of course and I wouldn't want to. Some of the barrier is the essential process of translation which turns out to be almost magic. That's when the writing itself, not the writer, makes meaning and both writer and reader get to come to something new together. Good tools don't tear down all the barriers, but they make the process more about learning than about the struggle.

Work Space

“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. Once wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 26-27

I call my study The Nook. It is a good space for writing. It is very small, warm, and easy to light since my desk is such a small space and I need not worry about lighting the rest of the room. There are good speakers there because I like to write with music, but The Nook is in the basement away from my family so that there are few distractions. But it is in the basement and so the window, a divided pane that I rescued from the curb on garbage night, looks out onto more basement and only a feeble light from the small window across that room.

Annie Dillard wants "a room with no view," and I get where she's going, but given the choice of Nook placement, I would move mine to the attic and have it be windowed on at least two sides. I would push my desk against one of those windows and keep the other to my side so that I could be part of the world I am imagining and remembering.

Billy Collins talks about writing near a window. Just a piece of paper, a pencil, and the window. The poetry is out there and in his head. It filters between and the window is as necessary to the writing as the pencil and paper, almost as much as the poet himself.

I am writing this in a classroom with students who are also writing. One whole wall of this room is windows. The heaters are on and the place is warm. The hallways are mercifully quiet. There are twenty-eight minutes left in the period before another group will come in and probably be less in the mood for writing than this one. Still, I'll find a way to get some words down on the page and screen.

There is no one writing space, not even for one writer. Dillard moved from a cinder-block cell over a parking lot to a pine shed on Cape Cod. While she prefers the cell, I would take the water and move the desk in front of one of the windows. While we have our preferences of work space, materials, and methods, I'm focused on being able to write no matter where, when, or how. Work spaces are good. They are important. Still, the only thing that matters is to be writing. To be making meaning on the page or screen as often and as well as I can. A good work space helps, but wherever I am, there I go, writing across each line and down each page.

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The more important quote from Dillard comes five pages later:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Where is less important than what and how. I would submit as well that when the writing is done, who and whom become important as well.

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And then there is this:

During that time, I let all the houseplants die. After the book was finished I noticed them; the plants hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay window. For I had not only let them die, I had not moved them. During that time, I told all my out-of-town friends they could not visit for a while.

"I understand you're married," a man said to me at a formal lunch in New York my publisher had arranged. "How do you have time to write a book?"

Sir?

"Well," he said, "you have to have a garden, for instance. You have to entertain." And I thought he was foolish, this man in his seventies, who had no idea what you must do. But the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would." (37)

It's not the fanaticism of my twenties that shocks me so much as the fanaticism I still want to feel, that I imagine feeling, and that I assume will be necessary to do real work. I feel the fanaticism of someone on the sidelines knowing that to be out on the field I have to do little more than be living the game with every fiber of my being and to the exclusion of everything else. I know that fanaticism is foolish. I know thinking that way is a crutch to support my broken dreams. And yet I still harbor that fanatic kid within me and keep listening to his voice.

Choose The World You're In

Austin Kleon wrote a piece today worth reading entitled The World's More Interesting With You In It. The gist is that we are too eager to delete/unfollow people and all too willing to take ourselves out of the world. It got me thinking about having left social media.

I left Facebook and Twitter in August and have not gone back. Kleon writes, "Don’t disappear on us. Don’t cancel your own subscription. Stick around. Keep going. The world is more interesting with you in it." He's not necessarily encouraging me to return to social media, but I've been told that there are people who miss me some on those platforms. Should I try to make Facebook and Twitter better places? Is there value in me doing that?

The problems with Facebook and Twitter are that I don't respect their corporate values and they don't provide me sufficient value for my investment. I don't "connect" with "friends" and "followers" as much having left those networks but I'm working on that finding ways to connect with friends and make new friends. I've only made the slightest headway but it's a work in progress.

Withdrawing from the world might be a mistake though I've read a couple good books that say otherwise. Thoreau, who famously moved away from the world but also stayed in contact with it is a model of how to move in a direction that goes against or perpendicular to that which most everyone is following seems to me a very good idea. We have to choose our worlds carefully.

I'm happy to have deleted myself from Twitter and Facebook. I'm happy to no longer be in that world because it was a source of more unhappiness than contentment. Here in the real world I withdraw often in order to create something that I then bring back to the world, to others and, I hope, make this world a little bit more interesting.

A Cabin In My Mind

Lit a candle Saturday morning in the office nook to imagine I was in a cabin far from everything and most everyone. I have that whole thing imagined: a one-room cabin near water, a wood burning stove with kettle boiling for coffee, and no one around for miles. Lighting the candle in my nook, I was almost there.

The night before a friend asked how I've been doing. I said, I'm worn out and depressed. I wonder how bad I sounded and hope I wasn't too depressing. I can feel trapped in my life. My job isn't great and there seem few alternatives to it. Family life has been too busy. It can all be more than I want to deal with, but Saturday was an empty page on which to write a whole day, so I:

• Shaved my head and face to find myself in the mirror
• Did laundry to clear some dirt and clutter
• Raked and cut the lawn before the snow buries us
• Took down the front-door screen and put up the storm to keep warm
• Visited Mom to deliver a present and connect
• Wrapped a birthday present and smiled at fifty years of deep friendship
• Posted about depression wondering if it interests anyone at all

The good day was brought to me by good sleep. Even my jaw, clenched throughout the week at school, has relaxed and stopped aching.

I did not begin the day out in the middle of nowhere, but I didn't need to. My mind is a quiet, dark, and cold wilderness. I start a fire in there and let the kettle come to a boil. With my pen I light candles in the shapes of letters and words hoping they will provide light enough to see me through the darkness and into some new day.