When you're a writer you tend to take your physical ability
to write for granted. It's shocking when that skill becomes compromised.
Earlier this year I caught a finger in a steel door. The
wound was small yet impressively gory, and because of it my ability to write
with a pen and type was impaired for a few days.
That got me to remembering an episode in Ernest Hemingway's
life, when he broke his arm in a car accident in Montana in 1930. It was his
dominant arm, and they had to operate (using kangaroo tendons to bind the
pieces of bone together!), and it took many weeks to heal. With the arm
immobilized, he couldn't write with any ease—longhand with his left was
practically impossible, and typing one-handed was cumbersome, slow, and
distracting—and he became depressed. At that time of his life, that was unlike him.
I've thought about all this quite a bit more lately,
experiencing some disability in my dominant arm. Sparing you the fascinating,
innumerable details, I have a complete tear in the shoulder cartilage that
holds my arm on, plus a bunch of inflammation.
My chiropractor, viewing the dramatic MRI, assured me I need
surgery, and I spent weeks reading stuff on line and living in growing fear of
the months-long process of post-surgical immobilization and rehabilitation. I made
lists of things to do pre-surgery (buy pull-up pants, replace batteries in
smoke detectors, go to the hair salon, finish all Christmas prep) and worried
some more.
But when I got in to see the surgeon, he gave me a reprieve:
with drugs and therapy, I might regain an acceptable level of function without
having an operation that cannot be guaranteed to succeed anyway.
By a stroke of luck and faith, I hooked up with a wizard
physical therapist who has worked behind the scenes with elite athletes and
ordinary joes, rehabbing grievous injuries and restoring amazing function.
We've just begun, and I'm encouraged. Am typing this with both hands!
But I did go ahead and order some voice-recognition software
(Dragon). Because even though I'm able to write normally for the moment, I
realized the great truth of being able-bodied: You never know. Moreover, I've wondered what it would be like to write with
my vocal cords, so to speak. I'll give it a try.
Which feeds into the issue of productivity. These days,
given the multitude of demands on authors' time, what with social media,
self-promo, and all that bullshit, authors are increasingly concerned with
productivity in the time they DO allocate for actual writing. And it's a given
that the bigger your backlist is, the better your sales, the better your income.
Obviously we can talk faster than we can write—so is that the future of
composition?
Output alone won't cut it, of course. Yet on the other hand,
it does, for many writers. Some put out hurried, half-done crap just for the
sake of getting another title out there.
This will be an interesting trip.
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[Kangaroo photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]
[Kangaroo photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.]
