The Seduction of the Screen

As our two month sojourn in France draws to an end so does the first draft of my novel.

I now have 80,000 words and it seems amazing to me that I could have written so much in these two months. It is down to what I like to think of as the writing heat of France. But it is also about a departure from my normal method of working which is to write in a notebook and then transcribe onto the laptop.

 Here I have done something very different which is to work directly on the screen. It wasn’t particularly intentional, it just happened, perhaps because I’d already done a lot of thinking about this novel before I wrote my first words. Working on the screen like this is fast and it is different. What I have now, is virtually unedited, absolutely first draft, whereas normally when I transcribe it means my work on screen has already gone through a major edit.

 I have really enjoyed working on the screen like this but only because I’ve given myself the freedom to write fast, without putting on my editor’s head, so that what appears still has, I hope, that first glorious creative splurge.

 The danger of course is that once something gets on the screen it looks more perfect than it is!

 So how to avoid the trap of thinking once your work is on the screen it’s good enough? My advice is make it strange!One thing that works quite well for me is using zoom. In the first place I took to using it to help my eyes which tend to get tired but I also discovered that when text is zoomed up to say 130% it is difficult to see it as a page in a book. You cannot scan it in the same way and you are forced to look at what you’ve written line by line.

 I realise of course that for many writers working directly on the screen has always been their preferred method of working and it works well and successfully but I still think there is something to be said for maintaining a certain caution –

– and guarding against the seduction of the screen that, Lavinia Greenlaw describes when she writes about poetry – ‘I do not write on a computer as I like to see what I have crossed out. A computer offers the seductive image of printed text. You may forget that what you have on your screen is a rough draft. The ease with which you can move, delete and revise your words can be deceptive and disorientating. Try to stick for as long as possible with paper and pen.’

I think the advice about sticking with paper and pen is particularly true of poetry and I have definitely experienced the disorientation of moving the words in a poem around so much the only thing I can do is start again – and not on the screen but in my notebook!

In case you are struggling to read the words on my picture of the screen – here they are – from Chapter 3 of the new novel:

It was five forty five, an hour before the club opened. It was an hour before anyone would appear on the other side of the glass, before they would sit down and before a voice, sometimes confident, sometimes pale; occasionally brash, would fall from the shadowy face and ask her to begin. Or perhaps not, maybe they would wait for her to ask what it was they wanted; what it was they would like to see. Sometimes they were snarling and abusive and the heat of their anger seeped through the glass.

             But the glass was shatter proof.

             Mostly they were quiet and contained, half seen but rich, at least rich in Gina’s world. It cost to see Gina.