The Craft of Words – Kirk Writes

Old Fashioned Letters

I am old enough to remember writing letters.

It was also long ago enough that I remember being annoyed by having to write letters. When I was a child, the only time I wrote was to relatives who, in the days when air travel was outrageously expensive, I had only dim memories of. I remember the obligatory Christmas and birthday letters – sitting at the kitchen table writing and shaking out the cramp in my hand. I wrote obligatory letters to my parents from cadet camp in the summer. There was a time set aside for it, and NCOs enforced it. Write or pushups, my friend. Your choice. We all chose to write.

When I was a young man there was a period where I wrote letters. I met a young woman and we wrote letters to each other. These were not love letters, for we were not in love. But she was a prolific correspondent, with many partners. Her letters were delights, and I wish I had managed to keep them. I always hand-wrote my letters to her, although I had access to a typewriter and my handwriting was poor. That was part of the process, the slow and deliberate formation of words and sentences, taking care to arc the Cs and put the top on Rs to distinguish them from Is, which is a problem I still have when I write cursive.

Writing a letter is very different from writing an email. There is little or no quoting. You might write ‘in your letter of 14 January, you say…’ and then copy a line. But most often, you’d say something like in your letter of January 14, you talk of… and then summarize your understanding of what had been said. But even that, as I remember it, was fairly rare.

For me, the process of writing a letter started with the recieving of one. Some people – my first girlfriend was an example of this – tore open the envelope and skimmed the letter as soon as they got it. I never did this for personal letters. I would wait until I had time and space – dinner was simmering on the stove, or I had settled down on the couch in the evening – and then I opened and read the letter. I read it slowly, savoring the words.

I always read a letter at least twice before replying. I will often read it a third time, and a fourth, if it is a good letter. When it was time to write my reply, I would make a cup of something warm and sit at whatever writing surface I had chosen. I always needed a deep surface because I had to support my whole arm.

I took my time, and I wrote what I wanted to say. I wrote as if I was giving a speech to the recipient, with an ear to the tone and the cadence of the words.

A letter is like an essay. A good letter assumes that the reader doesn’t know something, or things, and presents these things in a way that is interesting and informative. They may be trivial things: the weather, Aunt Judy’s hip replacement, the window in the front room… but a good letter illuminates.

And that’s what I miss about writing letters. The slow, deliberate, contemplative process of it.

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Growing Faint

Life Itself, The Craft of Words / Kirk

One of the strange things about the last year and a bit is that we have a shared experience.

That isn’t completely true, of course. Different jurisdictions have attempted to handle the pandemic via different methods. Some countries locked down hard, others less so. Some places mandated masks early, others later.

But we all shared the experience of our regular lives being upended in a short period of time. I, for example, had been looking forward to at least another three weeks of ski season in the sun. And then, within a week, I was in my house, with my family, and we did not go out together. One of us made a trip to the grocery store, masked, once a week.

We saved a lot of money on gasoline.

After the initial shock, I embraced the change. I was one of the lucky, able to work from my home. I set up a home work station right next to the desk I use to write. I got connected and reconfigured my work machine, and for the last year I have been able to do my job just as well as if I had been in the office. Better, actually, because I was never more than a minute from being able to deal with something work-related.

I started a home based exercise program, mostly body weight resistance exercises. I walked on the school field near our house early in the morning. I completed one novel, and started another, longer one. We binged TV shows together.

And yet, last fall, nothing mattered. I couldn’t gather enthusiasm for anything. I couldn’t complete anything – I had a dozen small projects started, and abandoned. Two dozen. More. Nothing seemed important enough to hold my attention.

I was languishing.

Odds are, a good number of you were, too. Hadn’t seen friends in months, hadn’t visited family, couldn’t go to the movies or the mall, couldn’t look at people’s faces when you did venture out into a sterilized world of hand sanitizer, door guards, lineups, masks, and nobody ever touching anyone.

For me, the state of languishing is similar to the state of depression in many ways. The big difference is that for the last year, I haven’t wanted to do things because nothing mattered. When I am depressed, I don’t do things because I can’t. It’s not that there is no point, it’s that they are impossible.

I’m depressed, I thought. That’s all this is, I’m just depressed, and I know how to deal with that. I increased my exercise and used a bright light in the mornings. I replaced my usual lunch of leftovers with a healthy smoothie. I put limits on my screen time, and on social media use.

None of these things helped. I felt better, but I still wasn’t getting anything done. Things still didn’t matter. I started using a reminder list and a schedule, attempting to regiment my life. That helped some, but only a little.

Then two things happened.

I started Mindfulness exercise – at first I meditated for just five minutes a day, then ten, then fifteen. (I use, and recommend, Headspace).
I read an article that my wife forwarded to me. This article. (It’s behind a paywall)

I realized that I was languishing. The things I had been doing to fight depression didn’t work, because I wasn’t depressed. I was in a sort of strange middle ground between doing well and doing really badly. I was in a state of mere existence. Nothing mattered because I couldn’t plan anything. I was in a continual state of reaction, sitting and waiting for the world to do something.

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.
It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.
Adam Grant, ‘There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing’, New York Times, April 2021

The New York Times article described it precisely. Joyless and aimless.

As I write this, in May of 2021, we still haven’t been anywhere. We still wear masks whenever we go out. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant in forever. Haven’t listened to live music for what feels like the last half of my life. But I have made some changes, and things are starting to improve. There’s a reopening plan where I live. Other places in the world have reopened. There is hope.

I continue my daily meditations. Mindfulness practice has helped me enormously.

I have started writing the second volume of my planned trilogy. I managed to give it a title, as well: The Eye of Esheen Khor. (Titles are hard. I may write about titles one of these days.) Progress on it hasn’t been as fast or immersive as the first volume, but I am working on it, and it is improving.

Some believe that naming a thing gives you power over it. I wouldn’t go quite that far with languishing, but I will say that naming it has given me a strategy for fighting it, a strategy that I lacked before.

Like lockdown, I see light at the end of the languishing tunnel.

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Lift Up Your Tools

Technicalities, The Craft of Words / Kirk

A writer’s tools are very personal things. I am reminded of years working on the farm where I grew up. My father had his tools, and I couldn’t use them most of the time. We had, for example, two scythes for clearing weeds near fence and irrigation lines. He always used the same one, and as much as I thought I got the worse of the two, whenever I picked up the other one, it just wasn’t comfortable. My writing tools are similar.

I’m writing this using FocusWriter. I’ve configured a theme that makes it look like an old DOS based word processor, with a mono-spaced font in green over a black screen. I started back down this path after reading a paen to WordStar on Robert J Sawyer’s blog.

I have fond memories of writing with simpler tools – although I never published any of it, my earliest writing was on a typewriter. I had a portable Royal on which I wrote both college papers and a number of unpublished short stories. Those stories are still around in a box somewhere – earnest and pretentious, most of them. In the mid-80s I upgraded to an electric Panasonic, though I always fancied an IBM Selectric. The Panasonic featured an integrated type-lift correction tape and you could correct the immediate few letters. I used that machine for years and wrote many more short stories, all of which remain unpublished. Then, in the early 90s I bought my first PC. I did this with the intention of learning to write programs, which I eventually did, but not before I fell in love with simple ANSI text editors that were like WordStar and many of which allowed you to use WordStar keycodes. I found that I really liked the readability of green text on a black background.

When you ran DOS, you could only have one program in memory at one time. Even so-called multitasking environments like DesqView were in reality task-switchers. That had some limitations, but it had some major strengths, too, particularly for the task of writing. When all you have is a word processor in front of you, you have to write. Either that or admit that you’re not actually writing, and get up and go do something else. There’s no bullshit like checking Twitter or responding to a quick email or looking up the weather. Write, or do not.

I have lately been looking to recapture that simplicity of interface, free of distraction. Microsoft Word is useful for some things, and pretty much a necessity for others, but for simple, focused composition, for flow, I find it cluttered and clunky. After reading Sawyer’s column above, I started considering whether I could make WordStar work for me.

To be clear, I never used WordStar back in the day. At the time I acquired my first PC (a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM!) WordStar was already considered obsolete. With people looking forward from single-tasking DOS to multi-tasking environments like OS/2 and Windows, simple 25×80 two color editors seemed archaic.

And yet I found myself leaving Windows (3.0) frequently. I wrote in a shareware editor named Boxer. I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code in Turbo C++ and Turbo Assembler. There were no distractions – the entirety of your machine was consumed with that single interface, that single task. If you had email, it had to wait until you’d finished what you were doing and had switched programs.
It’s that focus, that flow, that I would like to recapture. When the only tool I had was a typewriter, well, the only thing you could do is write. I would take my coffee and go into the spare room in the townhouse when I had an hour or two, and I would do nothing but write.

Now, at this point I’ve managed to write two first drafts of substantial works on a multitasking Windows machine. But it has been tough going at times. There are advantages to being able to look up a word or research a topic without closing the word processor and starting some other program, but when I’m in the zone, I don’t want anything between me and the flow of the words.

Ultimately I decided that there are too many limitations with WordStar, and with the more modern Windows clone WordTsar, even if the latter was ready for prime-time, which it isn’t. WordStar is limited to the old DOS 8.3 filename convention, for one thing. There are ways around that, but they require some hoop-jumping. Another problem is that an ancient program has no understanding of modern document formats, and WordStar is so old now that few modern programs can read its files. Again, there are ways around that, but once again that requires extra steps… and avoiding extra steps and bits and pieces are what this quest is all about.

So for now I have decided to try FocusWriter. I am composing this on FocusWriter set to a simple green mono-spaced font on a black screen. FocusWriter gets out of your way, hiding its simple toolbars until you mouse over to the edge of the window. There are still phones, of course, and other programs and notifications… but with FocusWriter, the words on the screen have the most important place.

As I finish this blog entry, something else has come to my attention. Freewriter offers what are essentially electronic typewriters – simple screens that accept a stream of input from a keyboard – mechanical, in the case of the original Freewriter. You can’t edit, only write.

Back to the old days… I’m going to have to think about that. Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for all along.

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