A new habit I’m developing: writing on paper.
Is this a foreign concept? So many of us live entirely inside of the screens of our computers, phones, iPads that we’ve started to put everything into them, both our work and our play. For me, that means I spend my nine to five reading and composing emails, creating decks, editing spreadsheets and (now that we’re all sheltering in place) attending virtual meetings all from the screen of my laptop. Then when I’m finished with work, I turn to my personal project of writing, both items for this blog as well as fiction, and my brain is fried. It simmers and snaps while I try to force it to shift out of business-mode and into creation-mode, also resisting the urge to click that new notification that just popped up. It’s too much.
On one of my now-infrequent trips to the market I saw a stack of composition books and I bought one. It sat at my desk unused for a few days until I daydreamed an idea for a story and started to write. Instead of opening an intimidatingly blank Word document, I got a pen and wrote by hand.
Since then, I’ve been writing every day, sometimes just a sentence, sometimes five or ten pages. It’s slow going—I’m not a fast writer, my hand cramps up, and sometimes my brain goes faster than my writing can—but it’s happening. And unlike a fleeting Word document, I can’t erase a paragraph I don’t think is quite right, or just delete the whole thing entirely when I convince myself it’s not good enough. Somehow having the physical words on the page forces me to just keep moving forward, allowing me to write more in the past month than I have in the entire past year.
I think that things get better when we move them off of screens, at least for a time. Having a notebook just for my creative writing jumpstarts me into that brain space every time I pick up the pen. Now I want notebooks for all the creative and ambitious projects I have, but I’m holding out to see if this sticks first.
Speaking of stuck, I also think that sometimes normalizing our routines can lead us into a rut without realizing it. I won’t jump on the optimism bandwagon and say that this pandemic is a good thing, but I will say that maybe some of the discomfort we are experiencing as a result of this virus is a signal to us that we have become overly complacent in our “normal” lives: our routines, our pathways, our beliefs, our people. It took a global shutdown for me to find the space mentally and physically to work sustainably towards a lifelong goal of writing more fiction, and it shouldn’t have.
If you can, use this time to see what you can shake up in your own life to reprioritize towards your own dreams and goals. Even if it’s as simple as spending three dollars at the market for a composition notebook.