Writing in the Stream – Page 71 of 76 – For artists, writers, educators, and critical thinkers.

The Shank is Deadlier Than the Sword

My very first letter soaked. I used an old tomato sauce jar lid filled with water to rehydrate the dried out ink on my grandfather’s old nib, then overturned the lid and spilled the water all over my letter.

My friend Jeff had warned me that the nib is directional: you pull the nib across the paper. It’s like petting a dog so her hair lies flat instead of against the fur, making it stand up awkwardly. You hardly need to press at all. A gentle stroke will do.

After drying off my sodden, splotchy letter, I resumed writing, passionately pressing the nib into the finally dry page, utterly disobeying Jeff’s advice. Impressive, Poe-esque gobbets of ink sprayed across the paper, delighting me. Je suis artist! However, I was less than delighted when I accidentally shanked the letter and fouled the tip by gouging the nib end full of paper, the fibers sticking out like a micro-hairball.

Delightful or not, it turns out “shank” is actually the name of the body of the nib. A shank points not only to the difficulty and danger but also the powerful appeal of this deadly instrument. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” they say. Certainly, the shank adds a new tangibility to that old expression about the pen and the sword.

Don’t believe me? Nib’s sharp!

If I hadn’t learned my lesson by shanking the paper, I would have learned it bloody well had I written with the same pressure on my hand. I was pressing far too hard!

But back to the power of the shank: Just picture a writer filled with a passion combined with a gentle yet deadly attention to detail, wielding an inked nib. Whoa!

Have you ever used a traditional quill made of a cut feather plunged into hot sand? What about one of these metal shanks?

If you’re looking for a way to write which finely picks up any direction or misdirection from your hands, I absolutely recommend the quill and ink. Quill-and-ink’s an honest tool/medium… as far as story making instruments go. You might say those who live by the shank die by the shank, in both crime and literary criticism.

In any case, the shank may also save your life. Diplomacy saves lives. So can the right story at the right time. And, there’s always the added benefit of cross-over in anything requiring manual dexterity. In that regard, I’d wager writing with a quill is good training for scalpel-wielding medical students, too.

So, if you haven’t tried it yet, I recommend writing a letter with one of these metal shanks. Or you could go the even more old school route with a quill made of a cut feather tempered by plunging it into a jar of hot sand.

How did writing with an old-school pen go for you? Do you like the nib, or do you prefer the trusty old ball-point? If you do use a ball-point, you do realize you’re writing with an oxymoron, right? Remember: the shank is sharper, more direct, cooler than an oxymoron, and mightier than the sword.

Sensitivity Hurts

Sometimes you can get stuck in a loop while writing, lacking the ability to break out and get past a traumatic event. Instead, while writing, you make the channel deeper and deeper until you seem unable to liberate yourself from the awful memory of an embarrassing, shameful, or otherwise painful moment.

It cannot be denied that writing can be painful. However, where does this pain come from?

I think that the deepest pain experienced by writers comes not from bad posture over prolonged periods of time, but mostly from heightened sensitivity. This often stereotyped heightened sensitivity of the artist has more than a nugget of truth. As unpleasant at sensitivity may seem sometimes, it is tremendously valuable to a writer.

What if this heightened sensitivity were critical? Helen Keller couldn’t see or hear anything, but she was not a rhinoceros. She could touch and feel. Her sense of touch was probably closer to a star-nosed mole than any other human being alive. No offense to rhinoceros. The rhinoceros can feel too. But hopefully you know what I mean. This isn’t about the rhinoceros that’s coming close to being wiped off the face of the planet. This is about another more common kind of rhinoceros — someone who is mean-spirited or insensitive, even without meaning to be, in their relations with other people. Perhaps you even know one or two people who have acted this way. We’ve probably all been a rhinoceros or confronted a rhinoceros at one time or another. It can be useful to have an impenetrable hide, but along with the painful bits, thick skin also tends to block some of the important and good stuff.

You may have turned to writing because you are aware of what many of people seem to be unaware about. Continuing to write has the tendency to further increase your awareness about whatever you choose to write about.

When you set something down in a journal and take the time to reread it a year later, your habits and hopes and dreams become painfully obvious. It becomes obvious where you have progressed and where you are still stuck in the same old habits. While it may not be fun to confront this, it is tremendously valuable feedback.

The key to writing in a way that’s not only increasingly well-organized brilliance, but also fosters your growth as a healthy human being is this: Treat writing as you would a position as an emergency medical technician.

Writers often confront difficult issues more directly than most people would care to think about. That can be traumatic.

In the EMT profession, you come face to face with people who have been disfigured, or who are dying, or who are in terrific psychic or bodily pain. You meet people who have made the wrong life choices and it’s too late to fix the plumbing of their body. Also, you meet people who have made the right choices — they were fit, ate moderately and healthily, never smoked, were kind to others — but suddenly through the twists of Fate, ended up in the ER or the OR. See: Book of Job.

Like being an EMT, writing forces you to confront reality — writing which does not confront reality simply isn’t powerful. I’m not saying that a book can’t involve imaginary worlds — Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a powerful book, and falls under the category of magical realism. Even fiction — or especially fiction, if it’s good — heightens and focuses our understanding of reality and the way we relate to one another.

Whether you’re a writer or an EMT, you need to be sensitive to other people and to what’s around you. You also need to take good care of yourself to be ready for it.

Written: 25 November 2012. Edited: 24 April 2024.

Writing vs. Living

How can you improve your quality of life through writing?

There are several misconceptions about writing I developed early on. The one I wish to address in this post came from someone at a poetry conference in Chicago. I had volunteered to help out before the event in exchange for a free ticket to hear the speakers and eat a fancy dinner with other people who ostensibly loved poetry. Across the table from me was a woman dressed like she came out of Madmen. She looked at me as a lynx would look at another passing snow hare after already having made a kill, and said,

“Don’t waste your life on writing while you’re young. You should live. You can write later.”

For one year, I let this torment me. When I sat down to write, I would often think of her words:

“You should be living, not writing.” I felt whenever I sat down that I should be using that time to be running outside, or going to a museum, or reading, or socializing, or watching a movie.

Luckily, a professor saved me. I expressed my concern and he said, “You are still alive when you write, aren’t you?”

Although running around and doing things is wonderful and gives meaning to my life, so does writing. Writing is an odd form of meditation. A meditation which records the thoughts passing through your head, so you can return to them and deepen them and polish them. And writing helps you ready and strengthen yourself for the inevitable changes in life: it develops your mental flexibility.

What if I said, “You should be living, not meditating”? What would you say? You’d probably know that meditation helps calm the mind, and focus your attention and even rests you in a very special way. After meditation, you feel more at peace and more able to direct your energy to a task. Meditation helps you better decide which task to focus on as well.

Don’t you think that perhaps writing is like meditation? That writing helps you live more at the ready and be more fully aware?