Skinny Dipping

[15.xii.24 : dimanche] V.W.’s 18 November entry breaks off in mid sentence … she makes a gesture to complete it nearly a month later when she picks up her diary on the 13th of December. She worries that “this diary may die” : she’s running the press & finishing up Mrs D & the Common Reader and having a life … who has the time left over to write a diary?

Alice & I are on the road again. Our son just graduated (Magna Cum Laude) from college and we drove upstate for the ceremony. I’m a week into a new writing practice … well, I say it’s new, but back in 2015 or there abouts I was doing the same thing, so I’m resuming a writing practice that began on a whim and because of material circumstances. Last weekend, I stopped by an office supply store to buy a new diary for 2025 and two mini-3-ring binders & filler paper. While standing in the checkout line I spied a fat Moleskine notebook. 400 pages! “For your longer stories,” said the label stuck to the cellophane. Yes, I thought. For my longer stories! I could sense that the notebook wanted filling up, so I bought it. A plan hatched : if I write one sheet (front & back, so 2 pages) per day, I’ll fill the book up in 400 days, a little over a year. I didn’t know what I was going to write, but I knew it would be fiction (not a diary). Thus it was that I began writing in this notebook on the morning of the 9th of December. I’ve come up with some rules of composition: the most important is that I can’t skip a day, no matter what, and that each day’s pages should include a reference to an element in the previous day’s pages, in that way I should ensure a sense of continuity in the narrative.

As I said, I’ve tried this daily filling two pages by hand practice before, but I couldn’t keep it up. The mistake I made ten years ago was trying to type the handwritten pages immediately, that is the same day. The problem was that (at the time) I only had about two hours each morning in which to write (now I have about four), so after spending the first hour writing the two pages, I’d spend the second hour typing. It should have worked, but didn’t because I’m an expansive rewriter. When I type something I’ve written by hand, in the rewriting, the text will often quadruple in size. Typing two pages, if I’m not confining myself to slavishly copying down the handwritten words, if I’m allowing myself to fly and to wax lyrical, then it could take three to five hours to rewrite (type) two handwritten pages. I don’t remember how long I kept up the practice of trying to type my two handwritten pages, but after a month, I was so far behind on my typing that I was thirty or forty pages ahead in my handwriting. What happened was that the typed (rewritten) version began to diverge from the handwritten original.

What’s going to be different this time? Well, I’m not going to start typing from my “fatbook” (that’s what I’m calling this 400 page Moleskine for now) until I’ve filled it, so 393 days from now, probably sometime around March 2026.

V.W. writes in her diary, “I am now galloping over Mrs Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O. [The Voyage Out] a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, & joins parts separately composed & gone dry.” I’m guessing that she’s making changes to smooth and polish, but she isn’t stuffing in a bunch more words. She’s not doing what Proust did when he was preparing his novel for publication and adding, adding, adding new material constantly even as the typesetter was trying to finalize the pages. My temptation is to follow Proust. I don’t think I’m capable of the kind of restraint that would allow me to write the same book twice. Still, I would like to attempt to retype one of my novels entirely from the start coz that’s an experience that all writers before the invention of the word processor had. Writing by hand & retyping are fundamental to the writing process.