The Moving Finger Writes

I'm on a train halfway between Portland and Seattle, sitting at a table with three people, each of whom is absorbed in an electronic device – one texting on an IPhone, another watching a movie on an IPAD, another playing Words with Friends on a Kindle.

I'm packing two laptops, a Nook and a cell phone; an MP3 player is pumping golden oldies into my ears . . . and I'm writing this in a paper notebook with a fountain pen.

Lately, I've noticed that I end up working just as quickly with pen and paper as with a laptop because I make fewer first draft mistakes. I'm also beginning to think that I may belong to the last generation that can do that.

I'm running into a lot of 20-somethings who never learned cursive writing. They can text on a smart phone faster than I can write, and I can certainly keyboard faster than I can write in what used to be called “longhand.” (My wife leaves teenagers gape-mouthed with her ability to write, and read, shorthand.)

I've loved technology since I met my first Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, but I can type very fast and my fingers get bored waiting for my mind to catch up with them, so they get sloppy. I'll think: “I should write home,” but my fingers type: “I should right home.”

Homophones like right and write, here and hear, or tear and tier pop out of the keyboard with annoying frequency. And commas? Sometimes it looks like someone spilled a bucket of them on the screen.

Raymond Chandler once advised writers who find a story starting to get dull to “have a man walk through the door with a gun in his hand.” As for me, when I'm at the keyboard and a poorly constructed sentence bogs down, my fingers just start poking dashes between independent clauses.  That doesn't happen as much when I write with a pen.

Why a fountain pen instead of a pencil?

For one thing, pencils make it is too easy to erase and re-write. You can bet Omar Khayyam had a pen in his hand when he wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Why not a ballpoint? Most ballpoints are expendable. A good fountain pen is something of value. It feels good and looks good in your hand. It glides over the page and the words literally flow from it.

Writing on paper encourages logical, linear thought. If you want non-linearity, you can write on note cards and move them around. But in our world, time, like fingers holding a pen, moves across the page in one direction.

Changing technology won't allow most of us to get very far out of step with the changing times. I'll have to keyboard this into my computer if I want to publish it anywhere. The computer has become the undisputed best tool for final editing and formatting. But as a writer, I like to think of myself as a man who walks through the door with a pen in his hand.