Blood Harmonies

Blood on the page

For as long as I can remember I’ve liked leaving traces. Preferably on paper but other surfaces can do in a pinch. Since I can’t draw, the traces I’ve left have tended to be words. Pages and pages and pages of words, poured out of pens and crayons into hard drives.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with a repetitive strain injury in my right shoulder, and advised to cut back on keyboard/mouse use. At first this felt like a like a death knell. Not only was I bang in the middle of an unwieldy freelance project for a Glasgow ad agency, but I was also in the middle of writing a drama for Radio 4’s Saturday Afternoon Play slot. So cutting back on keyboard time seemed a complete impossibility. If anything, I needed ways of increasing productivity.

While lamenting this to my father, he reminded me of his trusty old Parker ’51. As a child, I’d always been gripped to see how easily his words would flow from the oversized pen you see here.

Although I’ll happily change ink colour on a whim, my father always wrote in turquoise Quink, and always on square-ruled paper. To a child struggling to make her own name appear legibly on the page, it was endlessly fascinating to see how unwaveringly regular his handwriting was.

“Get yourself a Parker ’51,” was the cure he prescribed for my repetitive complaints about my sore shoulder.

Although it seemed slightly counterintuitive at first, I thought about when I’d first started working as a copywriter in the mid-80’s and what a challenge it had been to move from writing longhand to composing right onto the screen. Maybe pen and ink were the way forward after all. If nothing else, it would give me a way of finally using all the beautiful stationery I’d been stockpiling for years since moving to PC.

So I went to eBay, bid on my first Parker ’51, and a new obsession was born. Now, seven years later, I am the proud owner of a wide range of vintage fountain pens, which I use every day. Apart from text messages and most emails, I now write longhand first and then transcribe it – ideally as quickly as possible since, unless I’m scrawling my own name, my penmanship often continues to resist legibility.

Picking up a pen again radically reduced the pain in my shoulder. But like all cures, there were side-effects. For one thing, I am now a chromaphilic, unable to stop myself from collecting brightly coloured inks.

But even better than eliminating the pain, was the added pleasure of feeling how much easier my words flow when I write by hand. Typing by machine brings the workaday me out to play, whereas when I write longhand it feels like a lot more of me is getting out. Not in the sense of what I write being about me, but rather the things which matter most to me and colour my psyche are there, whispering to each other in the background of whatever I write.

When Margaret Atwood was promotoing Moral Disorder, a reviewer asked if the work was autobiographical, her reply made me smile. ‘There has to be some blood in the cookie to make the Gingerbread Person come alive.’

My agent, Meg Davis, calls this ‘blood on the page’, and is keen to encourage writers to open a vein. It’s excellent advice, and something I’m always striving to achieve in my own work. Which is another reason I find having a pen to hand so essential.

Blood flows better as ink than type.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 02:18 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.