Pen and Paper

We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid. And by that, I mean we didn’t have any. My mother was a single mother with four kids and we were on welfare and food stamps there for a while, until she met the asshole she would eventually marry and some nosy bitch in the housing project where we lived reported us, because he was such a schmuck he’d moved in.

With a single mother and her four kids.

In their government housing.

He was a real catch, no?

But I digress. There wasn’t much money, but somehow by the time I was eleven or so, my sister and I were getting a weekly allowance of five dollars, which was equivalent to $500 to a poor kid in the 1980s who had only recently discovered a love of reading and an even greater love of writing.

The first book I truly remember loving—like where it gave me chills as I read it, and I kept telling myself, out loud, how much I loved it—was The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I read when I was in fourth grade. I return to it from time to time, just to experience that feeling again, but it’s harder now. I’m old and jaded and it takes a lot. Still, though, surrendering myself to a book the way I gave myself completely to C. S. Lewis when I was nine years old was something. Like, to this day, I wish I could stumble upon a portal to another world in a closet or some other doorway. But, alas…

Not only was The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe the first book I truly loved, it was also the book that got me thinking I, too, could write. So, of course the first thing I ever wrote was what we would today call “Narnia fanfic,” right? Wrong. The first thing I wrote was a very poorly disguised knock-off of The Blue Lagoon and The Love Boat, because it was the early 80s, I was obsessed with Brooke Shields, and we only had three channels. It was bad, too. But it was a start, and I did eventually get to that thinly disguised Narnia fanfic, but mine used a mysterious fog instead of a wardrobe full of old fur coats.

But, that five-dollar allowance. Back to that.

In those days, mass market paperback books were affordable, even to a poor kid. So was paper and pens. I bought spiral-bound notebooks, loose-leaf paper, legal pads. Loose-leaf paper was the least expensive, but not practical, really, without a three-ring binder, so I bought spiral-bound notebooks and filled them with Narnia knock-offs and Star Wars knock-offs and Treasure Island knock-offs. Then came Raiders of the Lost Ark and I “borrowed” from it, too.

Once a week, as soon as that five-dollar bill hit my palm, off to K-Mart I went to buy more pens and notebooks because I’d opened the gates and the words had to go somewhere, so they went into those notebooks.

The Mead brand was my notebook of choice. The paper just felt better, and while it cost more than the other notebooks, it wasn’t out of my price range. I had convinced myself that the texture and weight of the paper made the pen glide over the surface better, thus producing superior writing. And those pens? Those clear plastic BIC pens that are now called “Cristal,” but that were called “Stic” back then. A pack of ten was roughly two dollars, so I didn’t even have to buy pens all that often. So, really, every other week, I’d buy pens and paper, and in between I’d buy paperbacks.

That was the life and I was living it.

Now, of course, I refuse to write anything longhand that isn’t a list, so paper and pens are a work thing now. I do all my writing in Word on a laptop. I think I’d go nuts if I did so much as outline something in longhand at my age. If I’m not doing it on my laptop, I’m jotting notes into the notepad app on my phone. I just can’t bring myself to make pen and paper part of my process, though in my twenties, my first drafts were always done with pen and paper. The old-fashioned way. I don’t know how I did it. And it probably explains why I wrote nothing but short stories throughout my twenties and into my thirties.

About fourteen years ago, I took a writing class at The Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta, from a well-known author of mysteries. I forget his name now. David something. The story I submitted to him is included in my collection A Map of the World: Stories, and I even have the copy with his notes on it. In pen, on paper. He said I was one of the few students he would encourage to stick with writing. That was nice to hear.

Still, though. Even at work, there’s a certain thrill in a new pack of pens (I use Pilot G2s now) and a fresh legal pad, like there’s so much more than a daily checklist stretching out before me to the horizon. Like maybe, just maybe, I could write my way out of there.