Back to basics with pen and paper
Kerri Thoreson
I came across an interesting bit of trivia recently that caused me pause. The island nation of Iceland has more writers per capita than anywhere in the world. With a population of 375,000 over the course of their lifetime, one in 10 Icelanders will publish a book. A possible explanation could be the country’s 21-hour-long dark winter nights provide ample time for indoor activities like writing.
For the past year, I’ve been writing a book, the first several chapters drafted. What I’ve discovered is when writing about a traumatic personal experience, the writing isn’t what’s difficult, the reliving of each detail to write is what’s hard. This book is not a true crime tome in the traditional sense, although it’s a true story and there’s no shortage of criminal acts. It’s the view from my front-row seat to a yearslong saga of betrayal of trust, and cunning criminal enterprise that ended in murder.
So I’ve stepped away from the computer and picked up a pen and old-school yellow legal pads to help focus. It seems I’m in good company with Ernest Hemingway, although his alternative was a typewriter instead of a computer. It’s said he found that the process of typing what he’d written by hand gave him a chance to improve his words. Writing by hand is less distracting and slower but I find I’m not constantly editing and re-writing in real time. It feels familiar since for the first years I wrote this column each week starting in 1990, every column was handwritten on yellow legal paper and input by the Press copy desk for publication.
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