Writing Faster

I enjoy writing.

By that I mean the actually physical act of writing. A pen on paper, loops and lines of letters, knowing they form words, sentences and stories beyond that. It’s a therapeutic activity up until the point you feel your hand is going to fall off. Typing doesn’t elicit the same kind of feeling, or at least not the same strength of feeling, but is obviously the more efficient way of putting words to paper, digitally speaking.

Unfortunately the problem with both methods is neither of them are fast enough some days. I tend to find my brain is racing at at least four times faster than I can get the words down and the visual stimulus of computer screen feels like an intrusion into whatever story is being written (don’t have this problem when what I’m writing is work related). I can type at a reasonable rate these days (I think it was near the 60-70 words per minute last time I checked) but I never taught myself to touch type properly. Intellectually I know where all the keys are and I can look away from the keyboard for short stints, however, my eyes are probably still looking down at the keyboard as often as anywhere else. This just seems to get in the way.

So that leaves me two options if I want to change the way I physically write. Either invent some direct cortical interface that allows me to write by thinking (which would certainly have a ‘coolness’ value to it) or type with my eyes closed. Unfortunately the later is more likely to result in hours worth of using a spell checker at a later date to turn whatever I’ve written into some semblance of English. Maybe I’ll wait for someone else to invent the first option.

This weekend we’re off to the snow (what there is of it) and my only plans consist of sitting in a lodge and kick starting my writing again. So far I’ve got one short story plotted and ready to write, two larger scale book plot idea to perhaps flesh out and a new comic idea that is at the point of writing up notes. Hopefully the outputs of the weekend will be a completed short story, another short story idea developed and some notes (and perhaps sketches) for the comic idea. Perhaps an ambitious objective for the first real weekend of writing in years but its worth aiming for something I’d feel good about.

Beginnings

"There's no such thing as writers' block, writers just get stuck"
It's not word for word what Neil Gaimen said at Comicon (so probably shouldn't have quotation marks) but its the general gist of it. He did go on to comment on the irony of people writing blog entry after blog entry about how they're suffering from writer's block.. by writing about it.
So, with that in mind, this particular darkened corner of the internet will hopefully become a means by which I can consistently force myself to begin to, and more importantly continue to, write again.
It's a little odd to type this now, knowing no one else knows this exists.. so in effect I'm talking to myself, but all things must start somewhere. Hopefully this will become a place where interesting I can note interesting writing things (to myself or others), comment on random life, ramble on about writing in books, movies, TV and comics and generally just put digital words to digital paper.
There we go, a beginning, such as it is. Now onto the 'middle'.