(The story so far: Two weeks ago now, I finished the first draft of a novel and immediately jumped in to start the second draft. As the first one was written in longhand, the second one needed to be a transition to an actual computer. I’m just a handful of hours into this process…)

When I started writing the first draft in longhand, I knew that I was setting myself up for a lot of typing in order to convert the analog draft to a digital one at some point. If I had a good reason for starting the first draft in longhand, I’ve forgotten it now.

I expect it had something to do with an offhand comment Neil Gaiman made on his weblog about writing the novel Stardust (and others) in longhand. It might have also had something to do with a (back then) new-found enthusiasm for fountain pens.

It could also have been Paul Auster. Or David Mamet. Or, hey, blame Ray Bradbury, if you like.

Seems like most of my favorite writers start in the physical world before moving to the electronic. Some of them — most of them, really — never get electronic*.

As I understand it, Auster doesn’t have a computer and Mamet hand-writes his early drafts before moving to a typewriter. So, apparently, they’re insane luddites as well.

I started writing in longhand, back when I was young. Then I went to a manual typewriter (an old Royal I picked up in a junk store and that I wish I still had). Then, in college, I discovered the Apple and, like Eve, I was damned eternally, electronically.

Greg Spencer said it at the beginning of every semester: “If you live by the computer, you die by the computer.”

And he was right more often than he was wrong. I learned early on that printing out the day’s work was much better than saving or multiple backups. Having an ever-growing stack of paper felt good too. You could see your progress in physical terms, not just in date/time stamps and incremental increases in file size.

So the movement to writing in ink, in a notebook, wasn’t a difficult one. I’d already been doing this with my poetry. For me, poetry never works on a computer. It needs a slower pace, a more natural environment to grow.

Poetry always starts as ink on paper. Plays, because of formatting, typically start on a computer. And prose is usually stuck somewhere between the two.

At least, until I started this.

Which is not to say that I have to write one thing with one set of tools and not another. I have written on all sorts of devices and media. When nothing else was available, I’ve been known to write whole scenes of dialogue in the margins of church bulletins, outline chapters in red crayon on childrens menus, and capture stray poems on the blank flyleaves of paperback books while sitting at a stoplight.

All of which means, perhaps, that I’m just one bad life experience away from sitting in a vacant room scrawling on the walls with my own feces (which is, obviously, only marginally preferable to using someone else’s).

Back to the notebook: There is something disquieting about having an artifact of your work, a physical object that contains years of effort — it becomes a precious thing and it’s difficult to feel comfortable knowing how vulnerable it is to the various elements. I went through a stage where the notebook went everywhere with me, even to bed.

And then, when there was more than one notebook, the completed ones were stored away from my house — intensely vulnerable to fire, flood, and theft for the simple reason that people lived there — placed in a location somewhat more secure with alarms and fire sprinklers and locks. Even now, I feel awkward about saying exactly where that place is. It’s like telling a stranger where your kids go to school. You never know…

But, again, I digress, so back to the question: Why write in longhand?

I have no idea.There was something solemn, perhaps ritualistic (certainly pretentious) about going and buying a new notebook and sitting down to start writing a novel. And that feeling didn’t go away. Every evening (more or less), I would clear off the table, lay out the book, my glass jar of pens, my notes, and a glass of something. I would light a candle and some incense as well — no wonder it felt so ritualized.

And, describing it here, I realize how closely ritual resembles fetish.

Regardless, it worked. I got it finished.

Writing in longhand had some limitations, certainly. I don’t know that I was as fast as I might have been, had I been typing — although I have been surprised at how slowly the typing/revising process is going with this draft. Typing in a page of handwritten text and making some minor changes in the process appears to be only slightly faster than writing them out in longhand. Fortunately, I can more or less decipher my late night scrawls from five years ago.

It’s also safe to say that the slower pace forced me into a different mindset that generated more layered, reflective prose than what I’m used to putting out at my breakneck 90 WPM. And while it took me almost four years to finish the first draft**, there were plenty of things that happened during that time which fed directly into the writing. All of which is to say that it’s better to believe that these things happen for a reason, that it was meant to be this long just so those elements could be there for the story when the time came.

Again, I’m struck how easily self analysis drifts into flat-out rationalization.

And, again, it doesn’t matter quite so much due to the simple fact that I can now say “Hey, it worked. There was a book on the other side of it all. So there.”

So now, the second draft is actually a two-stage process: First, I’m keying in the book page-by-page. I’ve been using Scrivener for this and it’s been a big help with organizing the manuscript. Unlike other applications I’ve tried, I have a feeling that I’ll stick with this one for the duration.

And second, I’m also doing some minor edits/refinements as I go. I haven’t had to do any major work on the writing yet (I’m mostly just typing) but I know there are a few spots coming up where there’s some bad, bad writing to clean up.

I already cut out a huge section that was easily a week’s worth of writing time from a few years ago. Coming to it with semi-fresh eyes has given me some distance on the choices I made back at the beginning. I don’t like cutting so much work — it’s not bad writing, just a side-trip down one of the minor tributaries of the story that detracts from the overall flow of things — but it was obviously out of sync with everything else.

I know there are a few more layered in there, most of them are meta-fictional stories-within-the-stories that might be fine as standalone pieces. If books had a ‘Special Features’ section the way DVDs do, that’s where these things would end up.

As it is, they’re out for now — at least, they’re out until I get the second draft done. If I see there’s a way to use them, I will. But I have a feeling they’re not going to make it back into the third draft.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll post them here, after everything else is done.

I just can’t afford to slow down. As with the first draft, the goal is to get this one done and done quickly. I anticipate that the third draft os where most of the refining and polishing will happen — I have a tendency to overwrite everything, just to get it all in there, and then go back and hack it to pieces with a machete (second draft) before refining and polishing things to a dull sheen (third draft).

And then, once the third draft is done, I’ll give it to a select list of people to read. And once I have reviewed and ignored all of their feedback, it’ll go out into the world of agents and publishers.

One of the other things I’ve been considering during this process is running a weekly podcast in which I read a few chapters at a time as I work through one of the drafts. I actually have a more important purpose than simple ego (not that there’s anything simple about my ego): I have found over the years that the refining/polishing process works better when I read things out loud. Forcing myself to speak every word gives me the opportunity to refine the page and rhythm of things, as well as identify the really clunky language that my eyes have a tendency to skip over.

The eyes forgive, the voice never.

And it’s fun to read things out loud and people seem to really like it when I do. So maybe it is ego after all.

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* Especially the ones who wrote before computers. And electricity.

** To be fair, I was working on a couple of other projects at the time — including a stage adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ and, well, surviving a divorce. Both of those projects took a lot longer (and took a lot more out of me) than I thought. But here we are.