Hilary Mantel, in the always entertaining “Author, Author” guest spot in the Guardian Review (March 6th) indulges in a playful riff on stationery and its relation to the writer’s work and the supreme importance of perforation.
“Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It’s better to say that you haven’t got the right pencil than to say you can’t write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it’s better lost. It’s not just writers who muddle up the tools with the job. The reading public also fetishises the kit.
“We have all heard the tale of the author who is asked: ‘How do you write?’ and answers in an exquisitely modulated Nabokovian-Woolfian-Dostoevskian discourse, only to be floored by the flat supplementary: ‘I meant, Mac or PC?’ There is persistent confusion between writing and writing things down, a confusion between the workings of the writing mind and the weight of the paper scribbled over. ‘How many words do you do per day?’ people ask, as if the product unwinds in a flowing, ceaseless stream of uncriticised, unrevised narrative, and as if the difference between good and bad writers is that the good ones have no need to do it again. Almost the opposite is true; the better you are, the more ambitious and exploratory, the more often you will go astray on the way to getting it even approximately halfway right.
“So while it’s on its way to going right, you take comfort in buying new notebooks. Buying them in foreign cities is a good way of carrying away a souvenir. That said, le vrai moleskine and its mythology irritate me. Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers? The magic has surely gone out of the little black tablet now that you can buy it everywhere, and in pastel pink, and even get it from Amazon ... The trouble with the Moleskine is that you can’t easily pick it apart. ... But surely the whole point of a notebook is to pull it apart, and distribute pieces among your various projects? There is a serious issue here. Perforation is vital – more vital than vodka, more essential to a novel’s success than a spellchecker and an agent.
“I often sense the disappointment when trusting beginners ask me how to go about it, and I tell them it’s all about ring binders. But I can only shake my head and say what I know: comrades, the hard-spined notebook is death to free thought. Pocket-size or desk-size, it drives the narrative in one direction, one only, and its relentless linearity oppresses you, so you seal off your narrative options early.
“ ... For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.”
Read the whole article here: