Back to the Long Way

 Back in February I talked about how I'd turned my car into a mobile home office to write in outside during the pandemic.  Through the spring and summer I have still been doing that, though sometimes I also will just go sit at a picnic table in the park--which I wipe down with sanitizer wipes first and really not just because of Covid.

Anyway, something else that I've started doing in the last couple of months:  writing by hand.  Like with a pen and paper.  When I was a kid we didn't have computers so I wrote stories that way and I probably still have a couple of really old stories in notebooks.  But for the last 30 years I've written almost entirely with computers or word processors.  I did still sometimes write notes or outlines by hand, just not really actual material for stories.

But recently I started writing in notebooks again.  With the warmer weather and the days getting longer, sometimes after dinner I like to go outside, usually to the park nearby.  But I'm not really going to spend a lot of time out there, maybe an hour or so until it starts getting dark and bugs get too bad.  So I found the notebook is more convenient in that case because there's less stuff to take with me and I can pretty much sit anywhere without having to worry about balancing it and reaching the keys and all that.  I don't necessarily do a lot of writing, just a couple of pages, but it has helped to keep the productivity going.

One thing that wasn't as much of a challenge as I feared is reading my own handwriting.  When I was a kid my handwriting was pretty neat but when I got to college and I had to start writing faster, it really got sloppier and it hasn't really gotten better since then.  Sometimes I'll look at a word for an extra moment or two but most of the time I can figure out what I mean by the context when I'm typing up the stuff I wrote.  A secretary or assistant would probably have a harder time, but fortunately I can't afford one of those.

Last year when I had a little eye strain I did also write in a notebook.  Then I tried using the speech-to-text feature in Google Docs, but it was predictably a disaster.  Sometimes it would show the sentence correctly and then change it to something ridiculous.  So I do still have to type up anything I write in a notebook.

Really the first couple of times I did this I didn't even have notebooks.  Like one time I was waiting around the Meijer parking lot for a prescription to get filled so I just found a couple of sheets of paper, like the invoice from my last oil change or something, and scribbled on the back of that.  But then I found a few old notebooks and made sure to have one in my car with a pen and another in my backpack for work so I pretty much always have one lying around if I feel like jotting something down.

It's just something else you might want to try if your productivity is lagging a bit during the endless pandemic.  Right now notebooks are probably really cheap with Back to School sales, so maybe stock up now.