The Inform­a­tion Super-Savannah

Word­count = 86,150

Typ­ing is not writ­ing in the same way that a cock­tail shaker is not a jug of mar­gar­itas. Discuss.

Any­one who is inter­ested in writ­ing some­thing is at some point going to have to type it (any­one who has tried to read a gro­cery list scrawled on the back of an envel­ope by any­one under 40 will see that hand­writ­ing has become sadly extinct in my gen­er­a­tion, its evol­u­tion­ary advant­age lost in the rapid migra­tion of homo sapi­ens from parch­ment forests to the Inform­a­tion Super-Savannah).

The more you want to write, the more you will have to type, and the ratio is expo­nen­tial. A simple email to a col­league can usu­ally be banged off in a single, barely-considered pass, whereas any let­ter you have to write to your car insur­ance com­pany will require at least three fully-edited drafts to con­struct the pre­cise series of logical state­ments which best explain the entirely inno­cent phys­ical cir­cum­stances which lead you to shunt a Mr Whippy van into a hearse.

A novel is at the far end of the con­tinuum. Let’s not even go into it: trust me, there’s a lot of typing.

None of it, not one key­stroke, con­sti­tutes writing.

So what, smart arse, is writing?

I could waste a great deal of your time here twat­ting on about the ima­gin­at­ive leap, the tech­nical devel­op­ment of char­ac­ters and nar­rat­ive arcs, the weav­ing of life exper­i­ences, philo­soph­ical ques­tions, obser­va­tions and pure fantasy into a res­on­ant, truth­ful exper­i­ence for a reader — an act, if you will, of carefully-crafted tele­pathy — but I don’t need to, because instead I’m going to say that it is build­ing a cat-house.

My edit­or­ial con­sult­ant, for reas­ons which don’t need elab­or­at­ing here, has to be isol­ated from phys­ical con­tact with the other neigh­bour­hood edit­or­ial con­sult­ants for three months. This morator­ium was declared three weeks ago, dur­ing which time my edit­or­ial con­sult­ant has been locked inside the house with me as I attempt to com­plete my novel and he explores his pas­sion­ate belief that ancient treas­ure of great and won­drous dimen­sion has been hid­den just behind the fab­ric of my couch.

When, early last week, it became clear that the two pro­jects would not be able to co-exist, I decided to build an enclos­ure out­side the house which he could access through his edit­or­ial consultant-flap, so to ameli­or­ate his cabin fever and allow my word­count to con­tinue its spas­modic climb towards wherever it appears to be headed.

The plan was that I would build a wooden frame, four metres by two metres by two metres, attach mesh to it, link the whole thing some­how to the edit­or­ial consultant-flap, and go back to work. This would take, accord­ing to the plan, forty-eight hours.

That was last Wed­nes­day even­ing. Today is Tues­day. How long did the job take?

Guess.

I went to Bun­nings and bought some wood. I then tried to ham­mer it all together. I went back to Bun­nings. Armed with a ham­mer and some nails, I con­tin­ued. I hammered the wrong bit to the wrong bit, and then found that I’d hammered them together wrongly any­way. I then hammered my thumb, and went inside for a while. 

When I came back out, I had for­got­ten about the two wrong bits and hammered them to a third bit, which turned out also to be wrong. I then remembered about the first two wrong bits, and went back to Bun­nings to ask someone to draw me a map. While there, I also bought all the mesh and care­fully inser­ted my credit card in a place where I didn’t know where it was.

At home, I dis­covered almost sim­ul­tan­eously that I didn’t have enough mesh or a credit card. Bun­nings told me they hadn’t seen my credit card and mildly admon­ished me for not look­ing after it very well. I told them a four year-old could lose a credit card, and they said they were forced to agree.

I can­celled the card and used up all my remain­ing cash buy­ing a saw, because it looked nice in the shop. I went back to the ham­mer­ing, which I thought I’d star­ted show­ing improve­ment with.

Bun­nings called to tell me that a four year-old had found my credit card.

This con­tin­ued for six days. Each morn­ing I would stride scowl­ing into the garden and throw myself with a wild yawp onto a ran­dom length of tim­ber or roll of plastic mesh, hit­ting, cut­ting, tear­ing and then get­ting up and going to Bun­nings for a replacement.

It occurred to me around Sat­urday that I might be miss­ing a step. What I was doing was a lot of ham­mer­ing, but very little build­ing. So I stopped, sat on the ground before my wretched, deformed, semi-dismembered cre­ation, and thought. I thought about everything I needed to do to fin­ish the job, in what order they should hap­pen, what mis­takes I needed to erase or replace and above all I thought about what the thing should actu­ally look like when complete.

I real­ised, among other things, that it needed a door.

To drag this hoary ana­logy home, I’ve been dong a lot of typ­ing recently, and that has been very prof­it­able, but before I go ham­mer­ing the wrong char­ac­ter to the wrong idea, I need to stop and see if I’ve for­got­ten to put a door in. There is now only the really big finale left to write in order to have a rough first draft, so care­ful thought is abso­lutely vital before going any further.

My con­sult­ant moved into his new offices this after­noon and expressed his appre­ci­ation by defec­at­ing cere­mo­ni­ally in one corner.