How a G-2 pen and a legal pad helped shed journalist handcuffs

The finished book — and the first draft.

There are few sights in life more lovely than a virgin legal pad and a trustworthy pen—G-2 bold points are my instruments of choice these days—resting loosely in my writing hand, poised and ready to begin the day’s journey.

And, of course, there are few sights in life more daunting than the same legal pad and pen resting in the same hand on a day when the muses are home still asleep in bed, and your book’s characters are nowhere to be found (perhaps they’re larking at a Fictional Characters Convention at a Best Western in Iowa City). But persuading these recalcitrant misfits to return to work is a matter for a future blog.

Today I want to explain why I wrote my first published novel, “The Garbage Brothers,” entirely by hand on legal pads, which, upon completion of my first draft, measured roughly the same height as one of my 3-year-old grandkids. It was a curious thing to do for someone who spent decades as a newspaper journalist churning out news stories, features, columns, and editorials on word processors.

I chose to abandon the keyboard to write my first novel because I wanted and needed to think as a novelist, a writer of fiction, rather than a journalist, a chronicler of facts and ostensible truths. A keyboard would have been ideal if I had been trying to produce a nonfiction book, but I had my heart set on writing a novel. I tried to start the first draft on a computer, but every time I began to write, I found that try as I might, I could not shed the reporter/editor mindset that was deeply embedded after four decades as a working journalist. I knew I had to break free of my old newsroom routines to set my novelist self and my book’s wild tribe of characters—free to roam inside a heart and head that the strictures of daily newspaper journalism had too long confined.

So I returned to the same writing habits and tools that had served me well as a young man who dreamed of being a novelist and who sat in countless greasy spoons drinking cream-and-sugar-laden coffee while filling mountains of notepads with fevered journal entries and bad poetry.

It worked. Little by little, squiggly word by squiggly word, I began to write with a freedom and artistic license that I’d forgotten existed. And the result was dozens of filled legal pads (did I mention that my handwriting is atrocious?) that needed to be transcribed and loaded into my laptop for editing. And I was happy to find that the keyboard and the newspaper editor mindset it triggered were invaluable assets when it came time for reworking and rewriting what proved to be a very rough first draft.

You might be interested to learn that I recently finished writing the first draft of my next novel, “Chasing Sam Bradbury,” on my laptop without setting pen to paper. I found that the years of writing and editing“The Garbage Brothers” had purged Journalist Paul and that Novelist Paul was present and ready for duty each morning when he sat at the keyboard. But I have to confess that now and then, I wonder how my new book would have been different if I’d written it using one of my trust G-2s and a bright yellow legal pad.

p.s. Are you in a book group, or do you know someone who is? “The Garbage Brothers” is a great read and provides plenty of material for lively discussions. And, if your group meets in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, I can, if I’m in town and available, stop by and join your discussion if you’d like.