Beginner's Mind

In my composition classes, we've had several conversations about the difference between typing our drafts and handwriting them. As romantic as I tend to be about writing--and as much as I love my little journals and notebooks--I have become a convert to the keyboard to such a degree that I almost can't think unless I'm typing. A lot of my students agree, but that may be a generational thing; some of my students, for instance, seem unable to think unless they're texting. But there are a few hold-outs, a handful of traditionalists for whom writing necessarily involves a spiral notebook or a yellow legal pad. So we've had a few discussions in my classes about what difference our method of writing makes on our texts.

Some of us--myself included--prefer typing because we have trouble making our pens keep pace with our thoughts (to say nothing of the atrocious script our frenzied writing produces), and we enjoy the satisfaction of seeing our text already "in print," as though the bulk of our work was already finished. It's a delicate self-delusion, because most of us are aware that a draft is a draft no matter how we produce it, and the hardest part--revision--still lies a long way out in front of us; but for us, this happy delusion sometimes works.

Others prefer the handwritten draft for much the same reason: because the pen slows down the writing, they argue, it also slows down their thinking, and they find their prose has a more deliberate, carefully considered air. They get to do a lot of the initial revisions--word choices, premise developments, and so on--in their head while they're waiting for the pen to catch up.

Also, these writers fear the printed page because, even on screen, the typed text feels too final, so that their mistakes appear indelible and all the more a mar to their writing for that; they feel typing removes the excuse of poor handwriting and fast scribbling for the errors they naturally commit in drafting.

I was reminded of these conversations today as I opened my iGoogle homepage on my office computer. One of the "gadgets" I've added to that page is a daily literary quote, and today's comes from Dylan Thomas (one of my favorite poets): "Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed," he writes. "I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear bad with conviction."

I'm fascinated by Thomas's ability to synthesize our conflicting perspectives; he has acknowledged both the strength and the frightening finality of a typed text, and he has made both appear positive, an empowering sort of excuse.

To learn more about this holiday and others like it, check out this Wikipedia article.

That's right, I believe in signs. I'm speaking in the written sense, mostly: Whether they're manifested messages from some divine authority or inidicators of universal synchronicity a la Jung or just psychological revelations based on a personal symbology, I enjoy finding coincidental meaning in seemingly mundane events.

In my novel, the narrator spends much of her spiritual journey rambling around the afterlife in a beat-up white Dodge Ram touring van. It's how she begins her journey immediately after death, and while she abandons the van in a fit of independence, it makes its way back into her journey through "coincidence" and becomes the literal vehicle for her descent into a nightmarish "hell" and evetually is the scene of her rape. When she kills her rapist and wanders into a desert alone, she finds the abandoned van broken and stripped, and she leaves it where it is to rot in the desert, so ultimately, it comes to represent her soul.

This morning, when I walked outside my motel to look at the dreary rain here in North Texas, I found a beat-up white Dodge Ram touring van parked in the parking lot. Scrawled with a fingertip on its rear windows was the message, "Hi, Elijah!"

I couldn't have written a more convenient spiritual metaphor, and I'm hoping it serves as a sign that the universe is conspiring in favor of my defense.

This was my "Buddhism quote" on my iGoogle homepage today:

"Wise men don't judge: they seek to understand."

Pretty much sums up the ways I grade and the reasons I don't like assigning grades. As a writer who insists on treating students like fellow writers, I don't want to "judge" their work--I want to understand it.

My sister has this life-long friend who grew up on a farm. Raised cows, learned to drive a tractor at age 6, showed pigs at the county fair--the whole bit. She once described to us the process of delivering piglets, an ordeal my sister got to participate in. Third-grade arms deep inside the pig, little fetuses squirming to get out, blood and muck everywhere. When I saw Billy Crystal deliver a calf in City Slickers, I had some idea what it must have smelled like, thanks to my sister's friend.

Birthing Revising my novel feels a little bit similar. I'm up to my elbows in the gory mess of my own words, and just when I think I've got hold of something, the walls constrict, grip my arm so I can't move, and whatever I thought I had slips loose.

And everything stinks.

sigh