A bad workman always fetishises his tools
Do good writers need to hate the act of writing?
Nanquan was on the mountain working. A monk came by and asked him, “What is the way that leads to Nanquan?” The master raised his sickle and said, “I bought this sickle for thirty cents.”
The monk said, “I’m not asking about the sickle you bought for thirty cents. What is the way that leads to Nanquan?”
The master said, “It feels good when I use it.”
from Essential Zen (Tanahashi/Schneider)
Some of the best writers that I have ever known write on the most horrific, broken, unresponsive laptop keyboards that I have ever seen. I can only imagine the accumulations of biscuit and jammy toast crumbs that fester within the undersides of their shallow membrane switches. I have seen some who write on laptop keyboards where a key cap rattles in place or is completely missing.
I recently watched the first couple of episodes of the Scorsese helmed Fran Lebowitz documentary Pretend It’s A City on Netflix and was struck by the writer’s assertion that she’s never known a decent writer that enjoys the act of writing. Her point is that if the writer enjoyed the process then the reader at the other end almost certainly will not. Maybe that’s the secret for all those amazing, successful writers with their brittle, germ-ridden keyboards? The great idea in their heads has to run the gamut of unsatisfactory tactile feedback and risk a nasty microbe finding its way under their fingernails and into their gut.
I bought my current keyboard almost a year ago. I know you’re not interested in the specifics but it’s an ortholinear mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches that I might swap out for the more tactile Glorious Panda switches. Many call the Cherry MX Brown Switches overrated, in the sense that the tactile bump is almost undetectable unless you are pressing the key very slowly and carefully. But I really like that slight hint of resistance with each key press, just about enough to keep me from bottoming out on most occasions.
My keyboard also features RGB lighting. Sometimes I set it to emit a brilliant blue glow with each individual key press so that I can feel like God transferring a divine spark to a reclining Adam. Other times I set it to have that blue glow beam softly from underneath the whole board. I know that this is more of a feature for gamers, the serious ones that use keyboard and mouse rather than controllers, but the effect seems to help me to ease into a state of flow.
This might just make me a terrible writer but I really don’t need my writing time to be another source of angst and misery. I have an abundance of methods for making myself unhappy when I’m away from my keyboard. I can quite easily piddle away an hour or four on a good doomscroll and observe my festering discontent in real time. Instead I choose to compose what could be the biggest pile of old tosh that would never disgrace a printed page and still feel better about myself after an hour or two of mindless tapping.
I sometimes think about the Zen koan at the top of this post, how the pilgrim looking for Nanquan does not realise that he has found the famous master and that the monk is giving him a direct insight into his teaching. Nanquan is sharing something with the pilgrim, something intimate and honest about his state of being at that exact moment. It really is a great sickle and he really does enjoy using it.
Nobody has come to me asking where to find Niall O’Sullivan and yet I wonder if everything I’ve written for most of this year is a case of me implicitly telling the world that I really like using this keyboard. I’m not so ambitious these days. My current guiding delusion is that there might be a few thousand people in the whole world who might really enjoy what I create and so my current quest is to find them. I’m like the writerly version of the incels who maintain that, among the many impossibly hot women distributed across the globe, there might just be one who thinks they’re worth a punt.
I think that there are a number of motivations a writer might have with regard to their audience and none of them are mutually exclusive. Some writers really want to inspire others to change the world for the better though more seem to want to be seen to be doing so. Other writers want to help their readers to escape into worlds far beyond their current troubles. Some writers, many of them poets, seek to help the reader to see the value in all the seemingly minor aspects of their experience. Some writers just want the world to tell them they’re okay.
I happened upon some poems I wrote a few years ago and I was struck by how apolitical my work has become since then. Those old poems were tight, funny and targeted, perhaps because of what they were motivated by. My political views haven’t really changed but I don’t feel a need for my work to change the world or let the reader know how right-on I am. If there is an aim that governs my writing these days it would be to transmit a sense of aliveness, an awareness of all that is here right now, to my reader. I have no idea if that is possible, what the best way of doing it might be and whether I have the ability to carry off such a transference.
I can only tell you that this keyboard’s price was slightly beyond my means but it feels so good when I type with it.
