At the same book talk that I referenced in a previous post, Daniel Silva also discussed the mechanics of his writing. It’s amazing to hear the ripple of disbelief from the audience when he says that he still writes his books on legal pads and with a pencil. He explained that there’s a spaciousness and momentum that comes along with writing by hand rather than typing. Legal pads are more expansive than screens. Screens and keyboards inherently lead to more in-the- moment tinkering and wordsmithing. Something like that. I’m sure he’s not alone in the world of writers when it comes to preferring pencil and paper to computers. Having recently made a switch from capturing music and lyrics in spiral bound sketch pads to google docs myself, I think there’s also an inherent anxiety when it comes to storing creative stuff on a computer. In the unlikely event of a fire, I somehow feel like I’d be more likely to grab my spiral bound notebooks than my computer. There’s also something deeply engaging about flipping pages, feeling the pen/cil move across the page, being able to scratch out, erase, and write in ways other than straight lines. Meanwhile, there’s something flat, linear, and decidedly uncreative about computers, even my MacBook.
But what I really want to capture here is something else that Silva said. He said in his best, most engaged moments, he feels more like a stenographer than a writer. I’ve often felt that in my best moments I feel more like I’m discovering and documenting sounds and words than I am writing songs. Artists across genres can likely relate to the feeling of receiving, of getting direct transmission, of discovering something out there in the universe as opposed to the more traditional narrative around art– that we generate, create, and produce songs, books, and the like. Writing songs feels like a craft to me, a sacred and meaningful craft. Discovering songs, being a stenographer of music, feels like a spiritual experience. Fortunately I don’t have to choose one or the other.