Writing in the Woods

I don’t know why I never thought of it before now. To be honest, I probably did think of it, but until now always decided, based on personal insecurities, qualms about walking too close behind Thoreau, that it was a bad idea.

I have intermittently carried my little notebook with me when I go hiking, to jot down notes, fragments. I come up with good ideas in the woods, though they’re most often of the stopgap variety, something that will get me over whatever hump I was banging my head against back at my desk, but fails to help me anticipate the next hump or perceive the underlying flaw that is the cause of these humps. Often I come up with half a dozen stopgap ideas on an hour’s hike and forget all but the least useful one. It was nice recently when I realized I could take notes in my iPod, which I pretty much always have with me. Still, too often I forget to use it.

Until yesterday I had not seriously considered the possibility of actually, committedly writing in the woods, of taking my laptop, sitting somewhere with my back to a tree trunk and knuckling down. I suppose this inspirational windfall is made available to me now because of an advance in technology: I now have a cutting-edge-as-of-Spring-2011 laptop that will reliably last 5 or 6 hours on a battery charge with the screen brightness turned all the way up. Hooray! I have caught up with the future. The technopaganism proponed by Willow in Season One Buffy is suddenly an actual, viable option.

I haven’t thought nearly enough about technopaganism. It seems the time may be ripe? More on that in the near future, maybe.

So today I went into the woods to write. It was too cold in the morning, but by noon, it was sunny and the temps hit 60, so rather than chicken out and end up hating myself after drooling all over myself with excitement at the idea the evening prior, I packed a lunch, laptop, book, cane, camera, mushroom-hunting kit, water bottle, hoodie and scarf and ventured forth.

So far it has gone amazingly well. Turned out I didn’t need the scarf. I was perfectly able to regulate my temperature as long as I kept in at least partial sunlight. When I got cold, I got up and took a walk. When I ran out of ideas, I took a walk. Or I picked up Little, Big and read a scene, or even two sentences, and bam, I was off again. Honestly I cannot think of a more appropriate, serendipitious book to be reading at the start of this experiment. Maybe it’s what gave me the idea.

The other benefit, the one that is so completely obvious I feel like kicking myself it took me this long to notice, is the surroundings. I sit at my desk in my office. It is packed with books and interesting supposedly inspirational objects I have picked up in my travels. But I’ve stared at all these books and doodads for thousands of hours by now. They have lost their inspirational capacity. Anyway, they sit there in the same office at the same desk while I’m writing computer code the other 80% of my life. It just doesn’t work anymore. So—I go out. I go to a cafe with a kickass view and good beer, like the Bookmill. I go to a big, old library with weird nooks and corbeled vaulting. Yes, these places are better. There’s new things to look at, different things, and I have made the effort to get there, so I might as well knuckle down. But in these places, there’s people buzzing around everywhere. There’s the internet. So I resort to my computer desktop background. Sigh, yes, it is a last resort. Yet it does give me solace, because it’s something I can change at a whim with no effort to give me something new to stare at. I hit the F11 key and gaze off into whatever woodland scene or mountain peak I last stood on with a camera. Sometimes I put my hands up around my peripheral vision like blinders and try to pretend I’m there. Then, sigh, I hit the F11 key again and go back to the blank page.

Are we seeing the obvious solution here? Is it absurd that I have not thought of this in 15 years? Yes, yes it is! Why would I not just go to that place I have been imagining myself to be, such that when I run out of ideas, instead of staring myself cross-eyed at pixels, I can look away from the screen and see an actual, 360 degree, fully olfactory and tactile woodland scene?

Also, not insignificantly, the woods do not have internet.

In the four hours I’ve spent in the woods since noon, sitting in 5 or 6 different locations—blood-red sumac grove, sun-bleached picnic table amid wildflowers, boulder, silver birch on hillside overlooking swamp, different sun-bleached picnic table under dead apple tree—I have written some 1500 words. Doesn’t sound like much to you big city writers, but for me I normally can’t hit that in a week.

Huzzah. Baby steps.

It won’t work in the dead of winter. It won’t work in the rain or the burning-bright, mosquitoey summer. But in late summer/early fall, when the sunlight is warm and the shadows cool and the bugs are singlemindedly absorbed in finding those last flowers to nectar up at before frost hits….

I think I may write a novel in the woods.