I am writing this blog on the first day following my self-imposed COVID quarantine. I tested negative yesterday, and today I went on a short bike ride. I feel about 70% recovered. I am still weak, and I still sleep upwards of 12 hours a day, but my brain is not foggy and my appetite is good. I never did lose my sense of taste.
I’ve done pretty much nothing for ten days, and after enduring the first three days of fever, muscle ache, and listlessness, I was more bored than anything else. I would say that, except for one not insignificant thing, it was a wasted ten days.
The one thing that was of significance, although I may be the only one who cares, is a return the way I used to write. Years ago I wrote everything with pen and paper. I’d sit in Jules Coffee Shop, read books and articles on a particular subject, and whenever a particular passage within those readings sparked an idea, I’d stop reading for ten or fifteen minutes to put the idea down on paper. I would not describe the writing as stream of consciousness, although there was some of that. It was simply recording my reactions to a piece of writing, then reading some more and writing some more. On a productive morning, I might wind up with a dozen double-spaced pages of marginally connected thoughts. The majority of what I wrote was worthless, but within the worthless material was some reasonably good prose. The hope was always that I’d eventually be able to extract the good passages from the junk and cobble them together to create a rough draft of a coherent journal article or book chapter. The process was very hit and miss, but the hits were sometimes good.
Over time I gradually shifted to writing exclusively on my laptop. Writing directly to computer made it easier to stay focused on a single topic, easier to edit, and easier to stockpile good passages that, while perhaps inappropriate for the essay at hand, might be usable in the future. When most of my writing was academic writing, this approach made sense. The slight drop in quality was offset by a significant increase in productivity. The total number of words remained the same, but the final product would be a finished manuscript rather than a collection of good sentences that didn’t always mesh. My university was not a publish-or-perish kind of place, but I was expected to publish a couple of journal articles each year. Writing directly to the computer helped me to accomplish that.
Unfortunately my writing loses some of its voice when I write on a computer. For scholarly writing, a lack of voice might actually be good. It takes out some of the subjectivity which, for at least quantitative research, is discouraged. For personal essays, which is the kind of writing I want to do in retirement, lack of voice sucks life out of the prose. A personal essay without a voice isn’t really a personal essay at all.
Yet, out of an unbreakable habit, I continued to write on the computer after retirement. I knew I should do more writing with pen and paper, but seldom did. While I was bedridden with COVID, however, writing on a laptop was physically awkward. It was much easier to lie on my side and handwrite into a notebook. I went back to reading nonfiction and occasionally stopping to record my thoughts. I not only remembered how much I enjoyed this approach to writing, but also saw in my notes several really good ideas that would have been lost had I not jotted them down the moment they came to mind.
Now it remains to be seen whether I will continue to write this way. I think that I will. Also it remains to be seen whether my notebook of marginally connected reflections will fit into the book I am working on. Again I think that it will. Why did it take a bout of COVID to bring me back to my old way of writing?
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