The Process of Thought to Page
Picture a car with two cousins, one in the back seat, one in the front, with a kind aunt driving them through the rolling central hills of Waikato, on the way home from a weekend away. Mark’s stream of consciousness is in full flight. I’m the cousin in the back, head tipped against the window, staring at the farms and trees, vaguely listening as Mark’s topics of conversation rove from hitch-hiking to advanced economics to art history.
Then he starts talking about writing, and my ears perk up. Not about fiction, but essays for his exams. ‘I reckon it would be so much easier if I could just have an implant in my brain,’ he says, ‘that takes thoughts direct to page.’ He goes on like this for a while, before my aunt interrupts.
‘Caro, you write,’ she says. I’m a little surprised. I hadn’t thought anyone noticed. ‘Would it be easier to cut your hands out of the equation?’ There’s a smirk on her lips. She works with artists: painters, mostly, all the time. She has most likely spent hours discussing the creative process with them.
‘It would be so much easier!’ Mark interjects. ‘It’s so much slower when I write.’
I have a think. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘My thoughts go through my hands.’
Mark blinks. I can see his blue eyes in the rearview mirror. ‘Oh,’ Mark says, and then changes the subject, freewheeling onto the topic of the essay and then to how lovely it was when he visited Vietnam the year before, leaving me in the back seat to try to untangle what my mouth has landed me in.
I knew right from a young child that my hands were the conduit to my thoughts. I wanted escape from my boring little country town, and books provided the perfect launchpad. I wanted to walk through a door and end up in Narnia, and when that didn’t happen I wrote about other worlds instead. I find it easy. I’ve tried dictation, and I’m sure I could train myself to ignore how weird my own voice sounds, but using my hands, while I can do it, is how my thoughts flow out.
Can I explain that feeling? When you put your hands down and the image and subconscious thoughts in your head just appear on paper. You know when it’s right, and when it’s not quite working but you have to finish the chapter anyway. I’m quite visual – my dreams are vivid, my head retains things I’ve seen far more easily than what I’ve heard – and it’s easy to transpose the head images into word images by writing. I don’t know if I can say “I think about the word before I write it”. It’s more that I just know what words need to be there and I let my hands do the work while my brain bounces into the next situation.
I do a lot of handwriting. I love notepads, notebooks, and lists. I draw all my maps, and hand-write my notes with headings such as “People”, “Places”, “Plots”. I keep a notebook in my handbag, and quite often will hand-write the first draft. I don’t mind the speed – which is something Mark didn’t like. The act of physically writing is slow, and yet that gives me time to think ahead of the next section, or paragraph, or chapter. I subconsciously edit as I go, if it’s slower. I’m a faster typer, and my second or third drafts are most often on computer, especially considering it’s easier to edit, then, when you’re moving whole chapters and chunks of book around!
Finding the time to write is a bit trickier. I have kids and a house and cats and a job, and writing gets slotted in when I can fit it. Most often that’s in the evening, sitting on the couch with a notebook or a laptop while my partner plays video games or the kids watch TV.
When I open a book to write, it’s my ultimate goal to at least get to the end of the chapter, but that isn’t always the case. I used to think I needed a few hours clear to write, but setting rules for myself is a huge creativity killer. Word counts, also, are my nemesis, even though I know lots of writers who use that as their motivation. I hate them. Generally, if I can, I will use pages as my goal, eg I want to write three pages today, but even that isn’t always possible.
I’ve learned to be kind to myself. Even writing just one sentence is something. Sometimes that kicks off a flow, but sometimes I just can’t think more than one, and I have become happy with that. Sometimes writing isn’t even writing. Sometimes it’s reading yesterday’s chapter and making two notes or corrections, and then closing it again. In all those cases, I let the magic that happens between my hands and my brain take over.
