How We Write
I have always been fascinated by how things are made, how people do things when they are alone, what happens behind closed doors. There is something about looking at the insides of a beautiful mysterious thing that not only leads to a better understanding of it but gives me pleasure. However, we don’t often get that with writing.
Writing is a solitary act. A few of us may have writing groups, or writing partners, but for the most part we do it alone–just us and the page or screen. We can read about language or sentence structure, or even the “correct” format of a story, but we never have the opportunity to see it happen live. There is no voyeurism–or learning by watching. Those of us who have been privileged enough to go to school to study writing are often told that we have to write every day, or write in the mornings, or write only after several fingers of whiskey, or glasses of wine. We are told to do what writers before us have done, or what writers who are more financially privileged than us do, but I’ve always felt this prescription did young writers a disservice.
It certainly didn’t help me. I felt guilty for many years for not being a daily writer. This guilt stuck until a mentor told me she didn’t write every day, that she thought about a story sometimes for years before she got it all down on paper. This notion, that I didn’t have to do something that I was told to do since forever, was freeing. It allowed me to simmer without any of the guilt that my instructors has instilled in me before.
So in the spirit of breaking these writing “rules” we’ve all learned, and getting to the nitty-gritty physical stuff in the best way we can, I reached out to handful of NANO contributors to see how they do it, how they write: where they sit, how they sit, what their desks and work spaces looked like, if they ate, what they listened to.
I’ve found that their responses make me feel more at ease with my non-traditional writing practice, and I hope they do the same for all of you.
Enjoy, and happy writing (or not),
Kirby Johnson
Editor