É Físico

Quando tive que escrever um trabalho pela primeira vez na faculdade achei uma chatice de todo o tamanho. Arranjei muitas desculpas. O que fez com que na véspera de o entrgar sentei-me ao computador e reuni todas das minhas notas. Ouvi Iron Maiden o tempo todo. Porque era música que me impelia para a frente. Hoje, anos depois, quando me sento ao computador para escrever qualquer coisa inspiro sempre primeiro. preciso de me concentar. Chamar a mim uma espécie de calma qualquer. Não sei porquê. Um amigo meu diz que escrever custa-lhe horrores. Não sou drmático a esse ponto. Apenas preciso de estar num certo sítio para o conseguir fazer.

 

Interessanta a entrevista de Paul Auster à Paris Review.

 

INTERVIEWER

And you write in notebooks. Not legal pads or loose sheets of paper.

AUSTER

Yes, always in notebooks. And I have a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.

INTERVIEWER

But what about the famous Olympia typewriter? We know quite a bit about that machine—last year you published a wonderful book with the painter Sam Messer, The Story of My Typewriter.

 

(...)

 

AUSTER

Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I'm finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process. You've finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you've already written. It's bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That's the moment when I always wish I'd switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way(...)