Tag Archives: on writing

alexandra wrot calligraphy type a

How did you become a calligrapher? I’ve been asked more than once. And the answer is, I just sort of did, which isn’t really an answer. But it’s the best short answer I have.

Once upon a time, for many years, I was a writer. It was all I wanted to do and all I ever thought I would do. I worked online, in print, for editors, on spec. Fiction, drama, film journalism. In college, I got my first longterm writing job and quit my part time retail job, which never really paid much as the clothing discount sort of canceled out that whole paycheck thing.

I was writing screenplays and doing magazine work and starting to do some editing, too. Into my mid-twenties, I was a writer.

Photography was always something I loved, but not LOVED in the way I loved writing. (Not like something I’d tattoo on my foot.) The heart in “I Heart Writing” was a great big puffy heart of the “I Heart NY” sort, while the one for photography was a bit smaller.

I chose not to major in film because I felt that it was a world I grew up in and knew well. Maybe I’d go to film school for my MFA. Undergrad, I stuck with English Lit and Creative Writing. Words, words, words. Yet from my early teens, I was always carrying a camera or video camera. I was making short films and documentaries. I was winning awards for the stories I wrote, and the ways that I told them. Still, photography remained a hobby until I was hired to do some commercial work in 2005, and suddenly I had a hyphenated career. Every picture tells a story.

The social media news cycle made for writing deadlines more Broadcast News than anything I’d ever known. I was used to having 6, 8, 12 weeks to do research and interviews and develop a story. Suddenly it was 24 or 48 hours, maybe a week-ish. I could balance editing and writing, but photo had to give a bit.

And the timing was right. Because another one of those things I loved and always did but not for work was turning into work, and there was no way I could be doing ALL THE THINGS.

Hand lettering, modern calligraphy, writing in the most literal sense. When I was young it was for yearbook and addressing holiday cards. Later place cards and invites. And then, just a few years ago, I began asked to do it as work, and I found myself happy to balance the speed at which writing for the internet moved with the slow and deliberate pace of pen and ink.

In 2010, Type A Calligraphy was born. (Tristan of Besotted Brand came up with the name.)

In the last several years, my writing life has changed so much I sometimes feel a bit adrift. The speed of social media work was hard to balance with creative habits I’d spent over a decade developing. But I looked at the direction writing work was going and wanted to evolve with it. Change was hard.

Do you know what doesn’t change much? Handwriting.

Sitting down with a ream of paper and a full inkwell is like meditation. I leave the desk and keyboard, or the pages of editing I’m marking up, and move to my dining room table where I sit down with one word or perhaps twelve. Focusing on the letters as they lose their meaning, becoming shapes and lines.

I write. And I write. Great big pink puffy hearts, I write.

alexandra wrote waiting rooms

May has been just meh, but it really began to fray in April. I look forward to June after almost two months of Super Pulse that is finally resolving itself in the sort of way it began - unexpectedly and without making much sense.

Tachycardia. My pulse wouldn’t slow down. Blood pressure and all the rest were low - normal and healthy low. But my heart was racing like I was doing cardio 24/7. And it forced me to do make changes I didn’t really want to make. Except I was too tired to fight it.alexandra wrote holter

AND IT SUCKED.

But I’m happy to say sucked, in the past tense, because it’s changing. Most likely because I’m no longer on the asthma inhaler that probably triggered the problem to begin with, which is ironic because when this first began, I thought the flutterings and the chest tightness were asthma. (It seems I should listen carefully to those soft spoken voiceovers on big pharma TV ads, after all.)

There’s a special sort of stir crazy that comes with being too tired to do much of anything mixed with the version of sleep a 24-Hour-Jazzercise-pulse produces. As one cardiologist put it, I wasn’t getting any actual rest, but it was more “like being unconscious, like Michael Jackson.” Um, OK.

(The erudite Jackson observation was only one of several bizarre conversations that took place in that cardio’s office over the course of a few visits. And always while hooked up to monitors or in some state of half-nakedness, where responding would require eye contact. Chit-chatty me tends to be less so when undressed under fluorescent lights in the company of strangers. I’d rather stare at the acoustic ceiling tiles. Maybe restlessly rest or something.)

I worked, but I was balancing it with a lot of time glued to the sofa, you know, unconscious. I had to miss things I really didn’t want to miss, but other things I was so happy to be able to do (including teaching my first TYPE A class, which I can’t wait to write about soon - although in one photo of me at the end of the class I could just see the lack of REM sleep so evident it made me cringe. But it was about the class, not how I looked, right?).

Still, all of this resting offered a bit too much time to consider all the words I wasn’t writing, but also time to discover something I’d long been trying to figure out. Why do I blog?

I began blogging because as a writer working more online, it seemed a natural progression. Find a bit of virtual earth and cultivate it. I’ve never quite felt I fit a niche unless there’s a writers who write about writing instead of writing niche and, if so, that’s totally me.

I was once assured that writing about celebrity or tragedy were sure fire ways to bloggy success. Both have had their place in my life and with rare exception have I ever felt they have any place on this blog. And I’ve stood by that pretty comfortably because I don’t want the web to own all my words, my experiences and my memories. And maybe that meant success couldn’t be mine.

The last few years I’ve unexpectedly found a passion for writing about social media ethics, thanks to blogging, in the same way other things came along to supplement screenwriting in the last decade and a half - film journalism, editing, working for clients writing copy or doing developmental editing which I love - and TYPE A, writing in just another way.

Everyday is a hustle when you freelance. And that’s OK. Except when you’re feeling stuck.

Being sick amplified it. Made it a bit terrifying because exhaustion makes it so easy, almost too easy, to find yourself in the doldrums. To pick at the scabs that aren’t healing as quickly as you want or need them to.

While the last months hurt, it was some dear friends in the blogosphere who helped me deal most of all. And that’s when I realized my success as a blogger. What I define as my success, my reason for taking up space in the cloud.

Just as in real life, at the end of the day, it’s not the page hits or the followers or sponsors that matter. The reasons I blog are about connection. They were from the very first post I wrote. And they still are.

Only connect…