Sick Writing
Friday, August 1st, 2008
Fighting a fever, a bronchial cough and the side effects of caffeine withdrawal, I finished writing a 1,700-word article this week that will be published in Present Magazine on Monday. I actually typed about half of it before the symptoms worsened the day before, using my thumbs and my BlackBerry. The handheld device and its miniature screen seems so much less daunting than a PC and is apparently a medium in which I feel less pressue to write well. It must be a Zen thing. Less thought, more emotion, and feeling more comfortable in using my first flashes on a subject – my first thoughts on whatever comes to mind.
When you’re writing on deadline, as I was, you have no choice but to perform no matter what the circumstances. The fever kept me strangely focused. I could feel it behind my eyes, locked on the screen and working the buttons while I layed on my back – flat in bed on a thick comforter, under the whips of the ceiling fan, across from a bay of windows that let’s in soft light and opens up onto an intersection where the neighborhood boys gather in the summertime and cuss as loduly as they see fit until an adult comes out to check the mail or walk the driveway and they hush their voices.
I wrote this magazine piece from memory. Rather than taking copious notes, I conducted the interview with a tape recorder running and merely jotted down the most important comments that I knew I’d use later. Usually, if I use a tape recorder, it’s for back up and so I can veg out on writing down every word of what my subject was saying in my nasty handwriting. But what’s even worse than going back through pages and pages of handwriting you can’t read is trying to roll through a tape-recorded interview that is 90 minutes long. All that fast-forwarding and rewinding, double-tracking, listening to the same snippets over and over trying to decipher through the background noise what a person is actually saying.
This time, I let the most important remarks stick in my mind so I could recall them with only a little prompting of my notes. The coughing, though, often took me out of rhythm when I turned to the word processor to finish the piece. By the time I sat down to the computer termninal to arrange my original BlackBerry thoughts, I was deep into this sickness I believe has been partially brought on by stress. I can’t seem to shake even the simplest cough, the same cough my wife was over in a couple days has lingered with me for the better part of two weeks. So, in the middle of these thoughts that I’d try to put to paper, these almost hysterical, deep, whooping coughs would take my hands instantly to my mouth and like that, the flash was gone.
By some measure of fortune, I actually did some “pre-writing” on this piece, elementary school-style, and had a body of material from which to work. I blew through the first draft and made very few changes on the second, which is not my typical system. As usual, I was careful to set the scene, because without the proper concept of time and space, all that writing becomes is information, no humanity. I suppose you never feel closer to humankind or the human condition than when you are sick, when you’re brain is fevered and it’s easy to sympathize with bored boys in the street or the legions of other writers through time who have had no choice but to find the words.
