I’m one of those people who has never learned to stop saying never. As in I’ll never write on an electric typewriter, on a computer, by hand again. I’ll never join Facebook. I’ll never twitter. All are things I have done and some of them I continue to do. Lately I haven’t been able to write on my computer—at least not the novel I’m trying to finish a decent draft of by June. I don’t know if it’s because I get distracted by the Internet—Facebook, et al—or if there is something about this novel that requires using a different mode. But a month ago, I was desperate. I felt like I’d never write another decent page again. I sat and stared at the computer. Checked my e-mail. Twittered. etc. Then I went out to the garage and found my little green portable Smith Corona—the second typewriter I ever owned. (The first one I inherited when I was about nine from my great-aunt when she died. She didn’t exactly designate me as the recipient of her old Remington portable from the 1940’s, but I was already the family writer by then, and it just naturally went to me.) But when I opened the dusty case and gazed at the snarled typewriter ribbon, I remembered the trouble I had finding ribbons for this model 20 years ago, and snapped the case shut. I had been romanticizing the process of tapping away on that typewriter, remembering something Norman Mailer said when explaining why he refused to write on an electric typewriter. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something about not having to be dependent on a machine that couldn’t work unless it was plugged into a socket. I no longer own an electric typewriter, so that wasn’t an option. But I do have a pair of hands. And so I considered writing by hand again. It sounded horrible at first. I have bad handwriting. My students remind me of this about every two weeks when I return their writing. It seemed ridiculous. Where would I sit? What kind of paper would I use? But I recognized that I was creating an enormous block by fretting over the instrument instead of the story, so I decided to try it. I started going through all the lovely journals people have given me over the years, believing, I guess, that all writers keep journals. (I’ve never kept a journal.) I flipped through blank pages, some lined, others unlined; weighed the leather bound against the paperback binding. A couple even have some kind of magnetized cover. Finally, I picked three spiral notebooks that neither of my sons is using for their classes: they are red, blue and yellow with a big Office Depot printed across the top. Nothing esthetically pleasing about them. I use them to write different sections of the novel, hoping that soon enough the notebooks would weave themselves together into a tight, suspenseful novel. For weeks I’ve been writing by hand. Hundreds of pages. Today, I decided that I would begin what I thought would be the laborious task of typing the pages into the document I began on my computer. What I discovered came to me like an amazing gift. With the roll-away file cabinet to my right—where I prop the notebooks on an old metal typing stand—and the computer in front of me, I am positioned between the texts. And a whole new process begins. I’m not just “inputting” the journals. I’m listening to the way the earlier computer draft is talking to the latest handwritten draft. I’m cutting, rearranging, creating new sections as the texts communicate. For now it’s working. I am back inside the story. Moving forward.