The Key(s) to Writer's Block

My writing routine includes a Mac book and an empty Word document. Slowly, but surely, the screen intermittently fills with letters, creating a peppered portrait. At least that's what used to happen before you came along, Writer's Block. Ever since my release from college a month ago I've undergone a painful case of writer's block. It's time for confrontation.

Dear Writer's Block,

I've tried everything: changing my atmosphere, hosting writing workshops on my porch, reading, doodling, listening to the radio, book clubs, events, and writing (gasp). The change in atmosphere only creates a drifting mind and, when applicable, intense sessions of people-watching and inner dialogue. Writing workshop turns into a wine manifesto, events are fun but mindless, and writing turns into illegible babble.

What else can I do, Writer's Block?

Buy a typewriter, you say? Why yes, a quaint typing machine that clicks and clacks should do the trick. A vintage toy that makes the sweetest of sounds, is irresistible to touch and impossible to ignore. Typewriters don't have Facebook or Google. Typewriters don't have iTunes or colorful, distracting screens. Typewriters help you get right to the point ... Write. To. The. Point.

Thank you, Writer's Block, for understanding. I'm currently waiting, rather impatiently, to pick up a vintage Underwood - the kind that Kerouac once used. My fingers eagerly await their unborn masterpiece.

Yours truly,
Alexandra

P.S For more information on typewriters and which authors used what, click here. Joan Didion used a Royal KMM, William Faulker used an Underwood, and Joyce Carol Oates used an SCM Smith Corona Electra. The site also directs you to your nearest typewriter store. Fingers, rejoice!

On Keeping A Notebook

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."--Joan Didion, from the essay, "On Keeping a Notebook"

My first notebook came to me as a Christmas gift from my sister when I was six. She had made it in a crafts class at the junior high, and it was pink, with multicolored paper pages and the word "diary" stamped in gold on the front cover. Though I wrote in it sporadically, I didn't start keeping a faithful journal until the winter of my freshman year of high school. Writing in a notebook is a practice I've kept up with, more or less regularly, since starting that random February day. I keep twelve years' worth of notebooks in a large red storage bin in my closet here in Boston. About once a year, on some rainy Saturday, I'll pull one out and start reading. Half-forgotten memories can pull me in, sometimes for hours at a time, but mostly I tire of myself quickly and put it all away in disgust. But I would never throw them away.

In her essay, Didion says she doesn't keep a notebook as any kind of attempt to record the facts of her daily life or to fossilize the events of the world around her. So then, why? Why bother writing random snatches of thoughts, imagined encounters and half-remembered lines of dialogue? "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point...our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implaceable 'I.'"

I had never questioned why I keep a notebook before reading this essay several weeks ago. It's just something I've always done, for better or worse. A compulsion to write things down, as Joan calls it. Though I now write for several blogs, once kept a livejournal, and can type faster than I can write, it's always been a notebook and pen that I come back to. Something about having a physical record gives me comfort.

It always surprises me to learn that some writers don't keep personal notebooks or diaries. There's nothing much of note or interest in my notebooks, except to me, but writing there helps me sort out my thoughts and get out my angst.

How many of you keep journals or notebooks? Do you have a routine or schedule?