I find myself in an unprecedented situation, for me anyway:
I cannot type with my right hand. Shoulder surgery last week has left me with
the unusual complication of nerve irritation (that’s what I’m calling it, since
the surgeon doesn’t know just what is.) For someone like me, who types many
words every day, it’s frustrating and daunting. And downright scary—although I
try not to go there. I’m choosing to think full function will return, and
hoping for sooner rather than later.
People’s first reaction on hearing my dilemma is a breezy,
“Oh, you’ll have to get some voice recognition software.” Easy for them to say.
And I’ll definitely go that route if the situation continues. But I find the
prospect disheartening. What this situation has made clear to me is that I
think through my fingers, specifically through typing. I type fast, pounding
out words as if they were eating up the pages. It’s hard for me to imagine
switching to thinking aloud. (It might be a good idea for me to learn to think
while I’m speaking, too—but that’s a subject for another day.)
Photo: Puttug my right hand to better use.
The question for now is, what to do while I perform the
suggested “wait and see” function. Just before the surgery, I completed a first
draft that came in at just over 100,000 words. To say I’m dissatisfied with it
is a vast understatement. There’s an occasional scene that works pretty well
and it’s an interesting, workable premise, but that’s about it. Characters,
setting, action, plot, and motivation all need a lot of work. My usual mode of
dealing with this would be to charge at the manuscript full bore, slashing
hunks of prose and typing out replacement chunks to see how they work.
Instead,
I’m thinking. Instead of writing a lot of words trying to capture what I’m
missing in a character, I’m picturing him going about his daily life, pondering
what he thinks about when he first gets up in the morning, or when he’s
overtired or stressed. Thinking about how he works and what he does for
recreation. I’m musing about his regrets, his triumphs small and large, what’s
really important to him, and how those things came to be.
Over
the years I have cut out articles on writing craft, flagged blog posts, and
underlined passages in craft books. Somehow I seldom get around to reading
them. I plan to take advantage of my enforced idleness to tackle some of these
articles. Who knows, eventually I may come to see this time as a gift.
And
now I’ve written an entire post with my left hand—a hand I admire tremendously
for stepping up its game!
5 comments:
Hi Terry. I've been thinking of writing to you since I finished A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge about a month ago. I first saw it mentioned as a new book so put it on hold at my library. When I started reading it, I knew I wanted the whole series. I closed the book, and found the first three of your series. I discovered exactly real lives people of I knew, living in places I knew. What a pleasure! My husband read each one I finished and he like them as much as I did. So I want to thank you for writing. And I want to tell you we wait (maybe patiently?) for the next one. I understand the difficulty that you wrote about today. I want to encourage you persevere, your wrIting skills won't go away while your right hand won't write. i hope this problem will become just an inconvenience in a very short time. You truly are someone special!
You do well with your left hand, and I'm impressed. I suspect that I frequently don't take time to think through my plots and characters, so I agree this enforced idleness may be beneficial in the long run. My mom always told me the Lord works in mysterious ways.
Wow, Anonymous, if there was ever a post to spur me on, this was it. Thanks for taking the time to write. #5 comes out in January.
Judy, I guess I have to go along for the ride and try to learn something along the way.
Oh, Terry. What a terrible consequence of the surgery. Probably shouldn't tell you that I was so grateful to be able to type again just days after mine, ramping up gradually.
But I think you're on the right track with thinking. About characters, about plot, about the story. And since you can obviously manage to bat out a couple hundred words lefty, at least you can leave yourself notes about your thoughts so you don't lose them. Better than handwriting lefty - OMG, the times I tried to write something on the grocery list or my white board with my left hand, it ended up nearly illegible.
I wish you all the best for speedy and easy healing and recovery!
Thank you, Edith. I'm laughing because when your comment came up I noticed the error in the headline. Should be "think," not "thin." I'm blaming my left hand.
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