Writing the Old-Fashioned Way

 

During the five days we were without power after the recent storm, I had to do my writing the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. Even so, I managed to get a lot of writing done.

The even bigger problem was doing research without the internet. Yes, my cell phone worked, and I could have used it to search for information, but the options for charging it were inconvenient and I didn’t want to waste my battery life on researching a story.

While waiting for the electricity to come back on, I started a new middle-grade novel. This is a contemporary story about a girl whose mother sends her to live with the father she has never known. That involves a bus trip from Florida to Indiana, but how long would it take? Without the internet to look up bus schedules, I had to guestimate it using what hardcopy resources I had.

The atlas said the distance from Miami to Indianapolis is just under 1,200 miles. Since my protagonist begins and ends her journey in small towns, it can’t be an express, so I worked the math out this way. Assuming a bus normally travels at sixty-miles-per-hour, it would take an express bus approximately twenty hours to cover the distance. But since it wasn’t an express and would be making frequent (albeit short) stops in small towns, I estimated that it would take about 1½ times as long, or thirty hours, so that’s what I used until I had the internet again. I’m not looking to use an actual schedule or a named bus line, but I still want to get the general parameters fairly close.

Once the internet was back, I checked the bus schedule and adjusted my time accordingly. There is no direct route and I had to add some transfers, but thirty hours wasn’t that far off. So I’m grateful that I had an old-fashioned paper atlas as a resource.

I was also grateful for the other physical resources I had at my fingerprints, including a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of baby names for naming my characters.

I was ecstatic when the electricity came back on and I could return to writing on my laptop and using the internet for research, but I will never underestimate the value of writing the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes it’s the only choice.