I don’t claim to be the best pen person there ever was, but when I wrote in high school I stuck to the margins. I could write a five-hundred-word essay in forty minutes, and, at least, twice it was good. I know because Mrs. Hess, my English Higher-Level Teacher read them to the whole class. Back then our country’s education system followed the Cambridge system exactly.  

Now, when I write longhand, I drift further and further from the margin.  The margin here can be literal or metaphorical depending on how deep you choose to be.  I view the literal meaning of moving from the margin as a metaphor for how I have progressed as a writer.

In terms of penmanship, I can say I have a more mature grip of the pen. A firm grip and a stream of consciousness type story in the making is hard to do without moving away from the margins. I know more words now than I knew in my late teens which makes me think faster. My most honest writing is ungoverned by the politics of words.

When writing on the computer, I erase and restart phrases so much that after an hour of writing I have only a sentence or fragment, there’s no evidence of bloopers. It’s like having no memory of ever having failed, and you’re just stuck in one place. Those are the days when subject matter is delayed in coming and I am at the verge of putting something literary out. But it’s always just the verge I stay at.

But oh, the days a story decides to come, it comes with beginning and denouement intact, flashback and reflection, theme, metaphor and simile and every literary device I know. Those days are gems for my writing life in that they make my solitude worthwhile.

See, I have the lower portion of someone’s house to myself, which makes me almost always, technically alone if you ignore the dialectics of the term “alone” and all others related.  I do not listen to music with the frequency people these days consider normal. This means I can spend a whole day in silence just thinking, observing the world, and those observations become the makings of similes or metaphors. And, of course, I read too.

How has your own writing progressed?