A Chat Virgin Breaks His Cherry

I had my first extended chat experience with my guest blogger/writer Robert Jones. We went at it for two and a half hours, talking writing, unloading our personal burdens and occasionally our phobias and neurosis. Chat is certainly different from email and telephone. In email you get time to think out your thoughts. In chat, you have to be more spontaneous and things come out of your mouth you might not ordinarily have written.

On the phone, Robert says he feels less open and wary of saying the wrong thing. Writing chat frees him of that. What was really fun was not having to wait for a response from the other side. The Chat Wizard would say, “Bobby is typing,” and I was free to also type at the same time. In vocal conversation that is called overriding your talking partner and kind of rude and annoying, in chat totally cool. For me it was like  a jazz riff, a stream of subconscious, let it all fly. I imagine if Jack Kerouac were alive and young today, he would adore chat.

As opposed to chat, when I write email I always am careful to express myself clearly, and correct typos. That’s the writer in me. In chat, I didn’t have that luxury. I guess it felt liberating, because when working on a novel I’m always judging what I am typing while doing it, making a lot of decisions and choices as to wording, grammar, and the rhythm of the things I am putting down.

I am not a fan of chat per se, and would never just do it about daily trivia. I see that as a waste of time, better suited for email. Chat has electricity, it is happening in the Now and you can either grab hold of the current, hang on to it and go for the ride, or fall by the wayside.

The experience reminded me of when I was a sports writer and had to go into locker rooms with only a few ideas of what questions I wanted to ask. Once there, I had to do what the Marines do, improvise, adapt and overcome. Winging it in a locker room one-on-one interview with millionaire, writer-adverse athlete is stressful, because any pause in your questions and the person, who would welcome a chance to get away from you, would close the conversation and escape.

Sometimes my mind would vapor lock, I had no idea of what I wanted to say or where I was or who I was even talking to, like my brain had stopped working. My back would always break out in a sweat. You’re losing this guy, say something, dummy. Usually I just blathered something nonsensical, but it bought me time to unscramble my brain, and then a real question would pop into my head.

Chat was nothing like that. I kind of dug it. Didn’t like that I was still doing it closing in on 3 a.m. EST., which would result in me getting up later than I usually do and cut into my valuable novel writing time. Bobby is on the West Coast, it didn’t faze him. When I brought up my time/sleep/writing problem, he scoffed at me and asked, are you addicted to your schedule? What I should have said to him is: a writer must be disciplined in his/her work habits. Instead, I got defensive and said some meaningless dribble.

But in a way Bobby was right.  Some of the best experiences I’ve had, and would one day recall and use in my writing, came when I abandoned my scripted life. Some real gems emerge from doing that.

Amazing how much you can learn from a 28-year-old fledgling writer. Different generation from mine. Foreign to me in some ways. But I improvised, adapted and overcome my inhibitions and habit addictions.

Chat. Thanks, Bobby, for the enlightening experience.