Eric Rickstad's prescription: Grab pencil & paper & GO!

HALLIE EPHRON: Today I'm happy to welcome Eric Rickstad to Jungle Red. He writes gripping literary thrillers, the kind that hook you on page one and don't let up until they gobsmack you with an ending you should have seen coming. Along the way, his prose dazzles.

His debut novel, a New York Times Notable Book, REAP, came out to critical acclaim in 2010; his fourth book, THE NAMES OF DEAD GIRLS, is just out. 

Eric sets his books in his home state of Vermont, this new one on a remote college campus. You can feel the poetry in his writing in this one-sentence introduction to Detective Frank Rath's niece, now his adopted daughter (her parents were killed):

Rachel Rath's flesh knew before her mind did that she was being watched.

I won't spoil what happens, but let's just say it's a page turner. Reading Eric's books is more like inhaling than reading... and I asked him what writing them is like for him.

ERIC RICKSTAD:  I write my novel’s first drafts in notebooks, with #2 pencils. I like the physicality, the feel and sound as graphite scratches paper. I like to cross out a paragraph with a dark, violent X, to circle a passage and draw arrows up to show where the passage really belongs, then draw more arrows. I like to doodle and to scribble notes, important notes like: This sucks, get a job. I like to write anywhere I want when I want, on a stream bank or on my porch steps, or perhaps your porch steps.

What I love about writing with a pencil is that the writing comes so much easier, in a surge I cannot replicate when click-clacking keys. The physical act of writing sparks a white-hot livewire from my mind to pencil to page.

There was a period when I “transitioned” to writing first drafts on my laptop. It was wasted time, I reasoned, to write a novel in a notebook only to then have to type into a Word doc what looked like a 100,000-word drug prescription.

During this period, the words still came. Yet, I found myself “stuck” far more often, staring at the blinking cursor, and, while stuck, I became tempted to “check” email, social media, and “breaking news.” When I succumbed to this temptation, it proved a shameful waste of time. We all do it, but I loathed it.

So, I made a pact: when I got  stuck staring at a cursor, I’d shut down the laptop, grab my pencil, pocketknife, and notebook, and venture to a comfy chair or under a tree. 

And. Voila. No longer stuck. Often on a day when I got no writing done in the first few hours on my laptop, I ended up writing 20 notebook pages in an hour. Not all of it was good, but all of it was useful. Every word we write is useful.

Long ago, I reverted back to writing first drafts longhand. I have boxes and boxes of notebooks of my novels. Even when working on a tenth draft in Word, I’ll go to the notebook to work out a plot point or to resurrect a dead passage by writing it anew on a real page with a real pencil.

I still get stuck writing this way. I still have atrocious days of dreck; yet, instead of staring at that blinking cursor, I get to see how fine a point I can whittle on my pencil tip. I get to study the wood shavings, which are far more fascinating than a cursor. Even when no words come, I’ve not wasted time, my mind, my subconscious, remains fully engaged as I tap my pencil on the page. And, much as one tries, one can’t surf the Internet on a notebook page. Not yet.

So, if you find your writing is stuck or uninspired, for any reason at all, change it up, unplug, go to a location that does inspire, get outside, grab a pencil and a notebook and see what comes when it is once again truly just you and the page. 

HALLIE: Great advice! What I want to know from Eric is: Pencil shavings? Don't you have a pencil sharpener (my electric pencil sharpener is my favorite time waster)? And how much of what you write longhand actually ends up going in the book?

And for the rest of us, does the writing implement make a big difference? Pencil? Sharpie? Fountain pen? Or keyboard?? What's your weapon of choice?