Bottled Inks (Photo credit: pigpogm)
By this I mean: Some stories will not let themselves be told except in a certain medium. Usually my stories come out by typing steadily, sometimes doggedly at the keyboard. Some stories, however, will not let themselves be told except through writing it out by hand. This isn’t so bad usually when the piece is a poem or a short story, but a novel sometimes gives you hand cramps, butt cramps, and a lot of other little bodily twinges, but it is always worth it to get the initial story down.
Besides working diligently on WHRT and fighting off a horrible “cold”, a short story has appeared and it isn’t going to be told any other way than through a dip pen and a bottle of ink. Blue ink, to be specific.
Yes, I DO have more than just one color of bottled ink. There is one used specifically for my handwritten diary, and several more for whatever mood the story decides it must be told in or a letter that can sometimes be VERY colorful.
You know you have support for handwriting your stories and poems when your significant other – Husband in my case, and your most wonderful of bestest best friends occasionally ask, “Do you need any ink?” And they also happen to surprise you with brand new dip pens out of the blue sometimes, too; or fountain pens you just weren’t expecting. *sigh* This is a true show of true love.
But I digress….
So, besides WHRT, I have found myself working also on a short story. I know it is a short story because of how everything is progressing. It is not a long story. The only thing is, since it is being handwritten, I am writing on every other line of loose-leaf notebook paper which means there is already a stack of 30+ pages. (I also do not write small.) Skipping every other line lets you type in the final draft much easier than line after line. This little trick was also instilled in me by several English teachers in college, one of which always wanted to see a handwritten first draft of a paper if possible – if possible meant he could read the darned thing and not guess at what the words were.
When I began writing my little stories I wrote them out by hand when my hands were not in casts, braces, or were not too mind-numbingly painful I couldn’t. I was about 12 years old when one of my sisters gave me an old manual typewriter. My fingers couldn’t push the keys down hard enough so I used unsharpened pencils for their erasers to push down the keys hard enough to make letters. I actually was fast. But, it was my Mom and Dad who set me free – they got me an old electric typewriter from a county School Sale and Sister3 provided me with an old typing manual and I learned touch-typing. Let the choir sing FREEDOM!!!!!
There is something I actually miss about hearing the clickity clack of typewriter keys hitting the paper and magically making words. It was a transport system for me in many, many senses of the word.
From the typewriter I grew to the computer and it was fast. There just weren’t words for the wonders of computers as far as story-telling were concerned for me, as well as for communication in general.
The World Wide Web and Internet gave me freedom to research in peace and quiet and immediately be able to look up something, anything that was in need instead of having to stop, make notes, and then manage to get to a library to look up the information required.
Technology’s advancement has let me write and tell my stories in a bit more comfort than otherwise it would have been for me, but this still doesn’t stop the story from stalling unless it is out in its preferred medium. And, I have also discovered, if you try to force the story out on the computer and it doesn’t “feel” right, you may as well just give up because what you end up with is garbage. Why should I spend hours at the computer writing, creating and it end up filled with rambling sentences, but when you change the medium the piece will flow and the words that spill out won’t be garbage.
I have heard sort of the same comment from some artist friends I have spoken with. Some pieces of art will only come out in pastels, water colors, etc., and when they stop fighting the piece and let it flow in whichever medium it needs to come out in, the piece gets done much faster, much easier, and a lot better than when they were trying to force it because it is coming out as it needs to, not as they desire to make it.
Now it is time for me to wash my hands nice and neat so they can get stained with ink as the short story gets told. I am curious to see how many words it will be once it is typed in and spiffied up for submission.
Happily I now go to the ink mines!
Related articles
- Progress Report – WHRT (kmgn.me)
