Tools of the Trade, Art, or Sullen Craft

Non-writers are often interested in the actual physical tools writers use. While attending a country school with two grades to a room, I had to use an ink bottle and a pen with a replaceable nib. No kidding! Fountain pens were common, but we had an old-fashioned teacher. When my byline began to appear the question was "Do you use a pencil or a pen?" or "notebook or pad?" Then it morphed (I know, it's not a verb in my dictionary either) into "by hand or on a typewriter?", "typewriter or word processor?", and finally "Why are you still using a typewriter?" I skipped the word processor phase and went directly from my father's ancient and battered Olivetti to an IBM clone and a wide-carriage dot matrix printer. My writing habits have been mostly electronic since 1984. 

Oh, what do I use to write? Whatever is literally at hand. I have laptop lust right now. When my eyes can't take the monitor or my back and neck start to cramp, I abandon the PC for my recliner and the TV. Inevitably that's where the best ideas occur. If I had a laptop and a wireless network, I could just type in the precious gems and send them to the proper PC file or even upload them to the Internet.

For the record: if not composing at the keyboard, I write mostly with a microfine point roller ball pen, often on a legal pad on a clipboard that I keep on the floor beside the La-Z-Boy. I have filled in crossword puzzles with pens for decades. I've always written poetry with pens, fiction with pencils. Journalistic pieces usually start with pencil jots (my own shorthand) on a steno pad, which are translated at the keyboard. Poetry tends to accumulate in notebooks, spiral-bound or three-ring binders (still!) What difference does it make? Writers are often quirky, like pitchers who wear the same pair of "lucky" socks, or batters who kiss their medals. It just doesn't feel "right" to me to write a poem with a pencil.

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