Shying away from the Dell

I've heard it said that writing is easy. Sure, you just have to be willing to sit down in front of a computer and open a vein. \nWriting is hard, but not because the actual writing is hard. It's hard because many of us haven't found a process that makes it easy. \nThe first thing I do in the writing process is think. I think about what I'm trying to accomplish with what I'm writing. Then, I condense that want of accomplishment to one sentence which runs through my obsessive-compulsive mind until I'm so brought to the brink of collapsing from self-inflicted aggravation, I want to collapse in a pool of my own vomit. \nThen I pop a Xanax, and it's on to the next step.\nThis is usually where the breakdown occurs. Now that I know what I want to say, I can't seem to say it. The answer is simple: I've written so much in my life that I just don't want to write anymore.\nSo how do you find the inspiration to keep on writing just when you think you can write no more? \nI decided that because I'm an old soul who would have been better placed during the uncertainty of the Great Depression and the sadness and turmoil of World War II that I should make like Ernest Hemmingway.\nI use a typewriter. That's right, a typewriter. \nI execute the whole writing process on a typewriter. It's an old Quiet Deluxe portable made by Royal in the mid-1930s. It's made from all metal parts and even being 60 years old, it's better than any office machine hanging around Staples today. I know a lot of people who do everything on the computer. They can even manage to write. But some people, like me, got burned out because we simply lost the intimacy between our thoughts and our words and we could write no more. \nThe human dependence on computers leads simply to a utilitarian relationship with the computer, and it's devoid of intimacy. With that lack of intimacy comes a lack of inspiration and energy. For you to excel at any activity, there has to be some sort of romantic pleasure to be enjoyed from the process. A computer is a tool. A typewriter is art.\nI use a typewriter because it's simple, and there's something therapeutic about it. I enjoy the perpetual clickety-clack of metal type bars, whacking a once blank sea of white paper, leaving their black impressions and linking thoughts upon thoughts together across each page. \nI make my revisions with a pencil, thus merging the new thoughts among the old for a harmonious blend of ideas that make up the second draft. \nI retype the next draft with all my changes from the first. \nThis is nice because it, through repetition, forces you to fully comprehend what you've written. Highlighting and cutting and pasting is something you don't usually have to think about much. But when you retype whole sections, you cement what you've written in your artistic conscious.\nAnd you keep repeating this part of the process until you're happy with what you've written, and you feel like the final sentence on the last page reflects the final sentence of the first page.\nAnd then, you've become a writer. But just as this is archaic and a Ted Kaczynski-like form of withdrawal, it's what makes the writing process individual to me.\nThe trick is this: Don't worry about the writing. Worry about the process behind the writing, because when you find a process that works for you, good writing is sure to follow.