Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned It’s Disturbingly Easy To Hack My Brain.

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So, I’m writing a novel.

Yeah, no shit, Phil. You’ve been writing a novel for the last four years.

Oh hello, Other Version of Phil. I didn’t realise this was one of those articles that’s a pretend conversation.

Well, you’re alternating between bold and regular font, so it sure seems like we’re having one of those conversations. I thought you always said they were terribly clichéd.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

I suppose. Anyway, back to your original point: we already knew you were writing a novel. Is it a new project?

Nope. Still the same novel I was working on before; the one with the taxi-driving psychopomps.

But you’ve been working on that for four years. Why mention it now?

Because, I’m actually writing it now. As in, longhand.

What, with a pen and paper?

Yep. I thought about using a quill, but I find it hard enough using a fountain pen without getting ink on my hands. Plus, I really didn’t want to have to get a bunch of goose feathers. Geese terrify me.

You know you can probably buy the quills online, right? No goose required.

I never thought of that.

Of course you didn’t. So, what prompted the change?

It started in earnest when I went to the Nantes Writers’ Workshop a couple of weeks ago. We were all given notebooks at the start of the week, and every morning we’d go out into the city to use them for various writing prompts. One day we were told to look at some of the ideas we’d written down, and try to incorporate one of them into a project we were already working on. I was looking through the pages looking for inspiration, when suddenly I realised I knew how to finish a scene I’d been struggling to write for the past six months. I wrote it in a coffee shop that afternoon. Then I finished the chapter. And I just kept on going. Pretty soon I’ll have to find a new notebook.

Nice story. But you know we have these terribly useful things called ‘computers’ nowadays, right?

I am aware of computers, yes. I’m using one to write this, as a matter of fact.

Then why the decision to go all analog? Why give up the convenience of a word processor?

My kenopapyrophobia got the better of me.

Your what?

My fear of empty pages. I wrote a whole thing about it, remember?

That rings a bell.

For one thing, every time I sat down in front of a keyboard I’d get this horrific sense of vertigo, like I was about to fall into a white abyss. And then there was my perfectionism. It’s very easy to write something in a word processor, but it’s just as easy to delete it in a moment of self-doubt. I felt like Oscar Wilde: spending all morning taking out a comma, and spending all afternoon putting it back.

Did you seriously just compare yourself to Oscar Wilde?

I have nothing to declare but my handbag.

Oh, boy… So what’s different about longhand, exactly?

I’m not entirely sure, but I think the difference is mechanical. Somehow the extra effort required to drag a pen across paper takes up enough extra neurons in my brain that I don’t have capacity left to worry about whether or not the things I’m writing are any good. It’s not about being perfect; it’s just about getting to the end of the next sentence, and then the next. It also means that I don’t get distracted by all the other myriad things that are stuffed inside a computer: namely, the Internet. Oscar Wilde never had to deal with the temptation of social media.

No, but he would have been very popular on Twitter.

That he would.

But wait, doesn’t writing in longhand make the whole process longer? Surely you have to transcribe everything to a digital format at some point.

Au contraire, other me. If I treat the handwritten version as a crappy first draft, I can make changes as I’m typing it up. I’m no longer creating — I’m editing, which is a completely different mental process, and one I’m much better equipped to deal with.

I never realised it was so easy to trick your brain into being more creative.

Hey, it’s your brain too. Besides, Stephen King writes his first drafts in longhand. So does Quentin Tarantino.

Two more writers you have no business comparing yourself to.

Oh hush. I’m just saying, it’s a well-established technique.

But there’s got to be downsides to it, right?

Tons of them. Hand cramp, for one. Spilling coffee all over a page of work, for another. And after spending so many years writing on machines that automatically upload a copy of everything to the cloud, my words feel more vulnerable on paper. I’ve had more than a few moments where my heart fell out of my arse because I couldn’t remember where I’d left my notebook.

So why do it?

Simple. Because it works.

What happens if it stops working?

Then I’ll go back to my computer. Or buy a typewriter. Or get a mallet and chisel and carve my manuscript onto stone tablets. The important thing is that I keep putting one word in front of the next.

Oooh, that’s a good line. You should write that down.

Thanks! I will. I just need to find a pen…